By Gwen Lee

Nothing has changed and everything has changed. That’s the refrain often heard from NPEs*  when they talk about their discoveries.

Nothing has changed. My husband still loves me. My children are still my children and they still love me. I haven’t lost my job. In fact, none of my co-workers even knows about my new status.  I still go grocery shopping every Saturday. I haven’t had to skip any meals. I still enjoy the hobbies that I’ve enjoyed for many years. The sun rises every morning and sets in the evening, painting the sky with those beautiful colored sunsets I enjoy so much. The ocean waves still meet the sand at our beautiful beaches. So, how bad can this development be? Why do I find myself dissolving into tears every day?

Learning that you’re an NPE affects everyone differently. However, I’d bet that the vast majority of NPEs find themselves confronted with changes of some sort. What changed for me?

The earth shifted on its axis. Fortunately, this was only a temporary change. It would greatly trouble me to think that I was responsible for a permanent change in the way the world turned. How could I explain that to inquiring minds? However, that was the how I felt initially.  My world turned upside down. There was confusion, which gave way to a realization that loaded me onto my emotional roller coaster, which eventually dropped me off at a place of curiosity.

My feelings about who I was underwent a big change. Suddenly I started asking myself, “Who am I, really?” I could look in the mirror and still see the same hair, the green eyes, the glasses, and the extra pounds I was always trying to lose. So I knew that people who knew me would look at me and think nothing had changed. They, of course, wouldn’t know what I was feeling inside. Maybe they made a trip to the snack bar and missed the curve ball that was pitched to me. (I swung and missed.) It felt as if my whole life had been a lie. I, simply, was not the person I’d always thought I was. I started ticking off my personality traits and physical characteristics on my fingers, examining each one to determine if it might have come from my biological father, whom I had never met.

My sense of my family and my place in it changed. I realized I had a lot to learn about my family history. I also wanted to learn as much as I could about my “new” family—the family of my bio dad.

I started dealing with this change by telling my close family members about my discovery. That meant phone calls to my sister and each of the two brothers I grew up with. It also called for conversations with my two sons and their wives. I left it up to them when and if they chose to tell my grandchildren. I knew I was imparting sensitive information but I felt as if this discovery directly affected them and their children. There was never any doubt in my mind about telling them. My family members all assured me that this news changed nothing about their feelings toward me.

I also knew now that the man that I grew up believing was my father, was not my father. That was another change. My birth certificate father was the only one of the three key players who was still alive. My mother and bio father had both passed. I’m a fairly strong believer that people do have a “right to know.” However, after wrestling with the decision for a bit, I chose not to share what I had learned with my birth certificate father. He and my mother had divorced when I was five years old, and I didn’t have a particularly close relationship with him.  The reason for my decision not to tell him was that he was in the throes of dementia and very near the end of his life. If my mother had still been alive I know I would have had a lot more to grapple with. Was that a bit of luck for me? Maybe, but it also meant I would always have a lot of unanswered questions.

I’d been doing a lot of research since I got my DNA results and made my discovery. I’d also gotten some help from people who’d been doing this kind of research far longer than I had. A big change for me was that I now knew that instead of being the youngest of four siblings I was smack dab in the middle of seven siblings. The siblings that I grew up with were half, even though I’d never thought of them as halves instead of wholes. Now with six siblings, I still didn’t have any whole siblings.

I’d been successful in establishing communication with two cousins on my bio dad’s side. I gave all my contact information to one of these cousins and asked him to pass it along to my three “new” siblings, all half-sisters. He told me he did but he also advised me not to expect anything from them. They could not come to term with their father’s “indiscretion.” One sister did, eventually come around to reaching out to me. We live quite a distance from each other but we’ve become acquainted by texting and talking on the phone. I feel grateful for her kindness and friendship.

I like to think another change I’ve undergone is that I have become more understanding and empathetic toward people who are going through their own personal crises. I have learned a lot, not just about genealogy and DNA, but also about the turbulence of that emotional roller coaster that people find themselves on when they’re faced with this sort of life-changing event.

I’m still working on making my way through all these changes. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as if I have processed all the changes. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over the feeling that there was likely no relationship involved in the circumstances of my conception. I still have some work to do.

My NPE status is never far from the forefront of my mind. So, while I’m sitting watching one of those beautiful sunsets or doing some of the crocheting that I have always enjoyed doing, I’m often thinking about the ways my life has changed and working on strategies to avoid stepping onto that roller coaster.

*NPE: not parent expected, or nonparental event

Gwen Lee is a mother and grandmother of four. She and her husband, Don, have been married for 51 years. Lee has lived in Southern California her whole life, and she retired in 2020 from her profession as an administrative assistant. She enjoys reading and crafting, particularly crochet. Her email address is gwenlee84@gmail.com.

By Kara Rubinstein Deyerin

Without having your whole story, you cannot have autonomy. Autonomy and decision-making go hand-in-hand. Autonomy, the ability to act independently and make choices based on one’s own judgment, relies on having a comprehensive understanding of the context and factors at play. If you do not know your true origin story, your ability to exercise true autonomy becomes limited or compromised. A fragmented or partial view of who you are may lead to misinterpretations, ill-informed decisions, and potential consequences that could have been avoided if you’d had the truth.

Barbie is a perfect example of how lack of information about the fundamental building blocks of your life and who you are can lead to an identity crisis when you discover the truth. Note to the reader: if you haven’t seen the movie, know that there are spoilers here. I highly recommend you see the movie and then read this article. Even if you don’t come back to read this, go see the movie.

Barbie lives in a world based on a fundamental lie—the belief that the Barbies have solved women’s equality problems in the real world. Because Barbie is a female president, doctor, physicist, and more, she believes women in the real world have this level of power too. How Barbie sees her world and herself and how she interacts with her friends and Ken is based on this being true. When she learns the real world is very different, it throws her relationships and her sense of identity into disarray.

People often have a difficult time understanding what the big deal is when someone has a DNA surprise and they discover that one or both of their parents aren’t genetically related to them. “What’s the big deal? You’re still you?” they’re often asked. The Barbie movie is a perfect example of “what’s the big deal.” Once Barbie’s fundamental truth about who she is toppled, she has an existential crisis. She’s forced to confront the fundamental purpose, meaning, and essence of her life and her own existence.

Perhaps through Barbie you can understand the aftershocks caused by a DNA surprise: how one sees oneself and their place in the world is no longer the same. Five years ago, after spitting in a tube, I learned I wasn’t genetically related to the man I thought was my father. I’d wanted to learn where in Africa his family came from. What I discovered was I had zero African DNA and was half Jewish instead. Everything about my life and who I was had been based on a lie. Enter an existential crisis that at times I still revisit.

When you have a DNA surprise, you are untethered from your past and sense of self. Your ethnicity might be significantly different, like mine. You can feel like an imposter in the culture and family you grew up in and also in your new culture and family. Your medical history is different, so how you’ve been caring for yourself may not be appropriate for your health anymore. This can be an awkward conversation with your doctor, and your kid’s doctor.

Your familial relationships are not the same. You have new family who may or may not want to meet you. And some of the family you grew up with may decide that because you aren’t blood you’re no longer family. How you see and interpret your past interactions with your family and the world is no longer true. You find yourself editing your memories in light of this new information. Even how you see yourself in the mirror is different.

At one point, after Barbie learns the truth, she wonders if she’s still pretty. Her looks haven’t changed but the lens through which she sees herself has. I recently told a good friend that even after five years, I am still surprised by who I see in the mirror. After explaining it wasn’t because 50 is approaching but because I grew up seeing myself as multiethnic—my lens was a woman with a European mom and an African dad. Those glasses were shattered by my DNA test. My new lens now sees a Jewish woman. My nose, my eyes, my smile—they’re all very different. Even now, after therapy and years of rebuilding my sense of identity, it can be disorienting.

With Barbie’s new information about her world and who she is, she must rebuild her sense of self and how she wants to be viewed in the world. She has an identity crisis. Ironically, this term was coined by psychologist Erik Erikson when he discovered in early adulthood that the man he thought was his father was, in fact, not his genetic father. This revelation had a profound impact on his sense of identity and led him to question his true origins, cultural background, and place in the world and of course to study the topic. Enter “identity crisis” into the lexicon.

Barbie is given a choice—whether or not to go back to how things were before, even a better improved version without the lies. She decides she cannot return to her old life. After the veil is lifted, most people can’t or don’t want to pull it back down. In fact, according to a survey of 605 individuals from Facebook misattributed parentage support groups, published in the Journal of Family History, 92% of those who’ve had a DNA surprise would not prefer to have never known the truth. As you’d expect, shock is the first word people use to describe learning their foundation isn’t what they thought, but the next strongest feeling is a better understanding of who they are.

I know Barbie felt this way too as she chose to move to the real world. Her first act of real autonomy—visiting her gynecologist. We must have access to the truth about our origins from birth. People have the right to their full story to develop a sense of self and their place in the world based on true information. You cannot have really autonomy if your life is based on lie.

The next time someone tells me they don’t understand why my DNA surprise rocked my world, I’m going to tell them to watch Barbie. If they can understand why it was impossible for Barbie to go back to who she was before, maybe they can understand why I can’t either.

Kara Rubinstein Deyerin is a non-practicing attorney and passionate advocate with almost a decade of dedicated nonprofit work. Her personal journey and professional expertise have positioned her as a prominent voice in the realm of DNA surprises, genetic identity and continuity, misattributed parentage, adoption, assisted reproduction, and non-paternal events (NPE). In 2018, her life took an unexpected turn when an over-the-counter DNA test revealed that she had zero African DNA and was half Jewish, which meant the man on her birth certificate could not be her genetic parent. This life-altering discovery sent Deyerin on an emotional rollercoaster, causing a profound loss of her assumed ethnic identity and leading her to question her roots and sense of self. Because there were few resources for people with misattributed parentage and a lack of legal rights, she co-founded Right to Know. She’s appeared on many podcasts, in multiple television interviews and articles, and is a frequent speaker and writer on her DNA surprise, the right to know, and the complex intersection of genetic information, identity, and family dynamics. Her dedication to empowering others and fostering societal understanding of these issues has made her a leading advocate for genetic identity rights and a powerful force in promoting truth and transparency in family building.

Update: The study has closed and is no longer actively recruiting participants.

By Angie Clark

I had a rocky, on- and off-again relationship with the man I knew as my dad my entire life. But in 2007, we were tight. We’d practically been best friends for about 10 years at that point. Unfortunately, he met a woman he would marry later that year and who, for various reasons, wasn’t a fan of mine or any of his other family members, and not long after, he completely cutties with me.

Ten years later, I heard his wife had been saying tacky things about me to my nephew and even had the audacity to say something to the effect of “Angie isn’t even his real daughter!” The next thing I knew, I was agreeing to a DNA test because, clearly, she is out of her mind … right? There was someone related to the family who was acting as a go-between, and she said we should take the tests. My “dad” took one the following week. I was happy to put to rest once and for all the rumor his wife had started. On Thanksgiving morning, 2017, at about 7am, I was awakened by the ding on my phone letting me know I had an email message. When I checked it, I saw: “SUBJECT: Your DNA Test results are in!” I was 43 years old, and my mind was flooded with memories and images of my life as I tried to comprehend that my dad, my hero, the man I’d wanted my entire life to make proud of me was, indeed, not my biological father.

Four years earlier, my mom had passed away. In those last days of her life, we had many deep conversations, and one of them was about my dad. She knew how hurt I’d been the last few years about his distance and that I never understood how he could just abandon me that way. How could anyone do that to their daughter? It crossed my mind maybe he wasn’t my dad, so asked my mom if there were any possible way that anyone else could be my father. She clearly and firmly said no, and I left it at that. It was just a random thought anyway.

After my DNA test results came in, without being able to go to my mom for answers, I immediately began making phone calls and sending email messages. I’d always heard rumors about my mom having had affairs, and my phone calls confirmed that. There was one man she was especially close with, a family friend, and there had been rumors about them being together. I knew him my entire life, so I called him. After we caught up on a few things and I explained what was going on, he told me that it would be him. He had been with my mom multiple times, and I even found a photo of them dancing together on New Year’s 1974, which is about the time I would have been conceived. I didn’t have a definitive DNA match, but I had an acquaintance helping me sort through all of the DNA findings because she had done a lot of DNA research. She told me he probably was my biological father because she found several of his ancestors in my matches. With my friend’s confirmation and his admission, we both accepted that he was my biological father. He told me that he didn’t want anyone to know because he was still married to the same woman he was married to back then, and he didn’t want to hurt her or their children.

Although it was painful and I felt rejected, I respected that he didn’t make this known to any of his friends and family. I tried to move on, but it was hard. I was dealing with so many feelings and different facets of rejection. I felt alone and unworthy of being wanted or loved. In addition, I was battling feelings about my mother. I would have expected to be very angry with her, but I wasn’t. I guess I was hurt more than anything. Hurt that she didn’t feel like she could be honest with me and that she carried that secret her entire life. I also found myself replaying so many times in my life, trying to dissect choices she made and things she said, trying to see if I could find any hints or clues that I might have missed. I also thought about the fact that the man who raised me was my “dad” for 43 years. Not long after my parents divorced and I was living with my mom, I came home from school one day and she had our apartment packed up. I was so excited thinking that we must be moving back into a house instead of the apartment, so I asked her where we were moving. “I am moving to California, and you are staying with your dad here in Texas,” she said. “He will be here in 20 minutes.” Before I could even process what was happening, I was in a car being driven by my stepmother, taking me to what would be my new home.

Now, as an adult with my newly discovered information, I couldn’t help but wonder how she could have done that? It’s one thing to abandon a child for five years, but she knew in her heart that he wasn’t even my dad. To think of everything I went through during those years, and again … he wasn’t even my dad. These types of thoughts and scenarios played out in my mind for the next two years.

Although I was coming to terms with this mind-blowing discovery, in the summer of 2020 something was telling me this story wasn’t over. I felt like I was missing something. As much as I didn’t want to open old wounds, I started to poke around again. On social media, I was introduced to a group called DNAngels. I sent them a message and explained my situation. I said that I’d discovered who I thought was biological father, but I felt as if something was missing. I wanted concrete evidence. DNAngels accepted my case, and within 10 minutes of just browsing my family tree and DNA matches, Laura Olmsted, who was working my case, called me. “Well I can already tell you that I don’t think he is your biological father,” she said. Wow! Here we go again, I thought. Another emotional roller-coaster ride, coming right up!

Laura told me that she’d do her best to confirm her suspicion and to find my biological father. She asked me to allow her some time as she was still finishing up some other cases, and mine might be tricky without many matches on my paternal side. During the next few days, I couldn’t help but be excited. Was this a second chance? I already went through the rejection from the person I thought was my dad. Maybe this was going to be the happy ending I had always wanted! Maybe a dad, maybe more—maybe a family!

One week later, a little past midnight, Laura sent a message. She was sorry for messaging so late, but she hit a rabbit trail on my case and was so excited she wanted to share it with me right away. She said she’d discovered my great-grandparents on my paternal side. This was exciting and amazing that she found them so fast. Over the next hour she messaged back and forth with a few discoveries and to let me know she was getting closer. After about half an hour of silence, when I thought maybe she’d decided to call it a night and go to bed, she sent another message. “I would like you to meet your Father,” and she attached a picture of a very handsome man, a photo clearly taken a good 60 years earlier when he was a teenager. I could see the resemblance between us. It was amazing! She sent a few more photos and more information about him and his family. She even gave me contact information so I could reach out to him. I was so excited I didn’t even go to bed that night. I stayed up all night thinking about calling him first thing in the morning.

All night, I played out in my head what I would say and how he would respond, and I would go through scenarios of various outcomes. Although I knew better than to expect a happy ending, that hope inside of me had been reignited. I knew he would probably be shocked; after all, he was 83 years old. I didn’t know if he knew about me or if this would be a complete surprise. My goal was to let him know who I am, and at least give him my contact information so he could reach out to me after the shock wore off, if he was inclined to do so.

At 9 a.m., my hands were trembling and my heart was racing as I dialed his phone number. I almost couldn’t even speak; then I heard him say hello. My first thought was that he sounded so sweet—like such a nice man. I said hello, told him my name, and explained that I’d been researching online and found that he knew my mom—that they worked together back in the early 70s. “Yes!! Of course I remember Nancy,” he said. I told him what I’d been researching and that I’d discovered he was my biological father. I said I understand it might be a huge shock and that he might need some time to think about it.

“Well… what do you want?” he asked. “I don’t want anything other than to give you my contact information so that someday, if you decide you want to reach out to me, you can.”  He then said he didn’t see the point of that, and as he continued to talk about how other people involved would be hurt, I couldn’t help but to slowly fade out to thoughts of rejection, disappointment, and absolute heartbreak. Again. I couldn’t even get him to take my phone number before he said, “Well good luck,” and hung up. And just like that, my second chance for a happy ending was over. I couldn’t believe it. How could this happen? Again.

A few hours later, I learned that someone associated with DNAngels actually knew him. What a coincidence! She’d worked with him at the same company, but later in the 1980s. She offered to talk to him again for me, to explain that I wasn’t a fraud, and to share with him how all of this came about. Before she hung up, she asked me what three questions I’d like to ask him. I replied:

1. Did you know I existed and did you love my mother or was it just a casual relationship?
2. Is there anything in my medical history I need to know? I’ve battled several chronic illnesses so this would be great information to have.
3. Is there anything you want to know about me—anything that I could share about myself?

A few hours later, she called back and told me about her conversation with him. No, he did not love my mother, it was an on and off again sexual affair that started at work. He claimed he didn’t know about me or even that she’d been pregnant. He shared with her his medical history, and after she asked the last question about what might want to know about me, he said, “Well, I don’t know, I can’t think of anything.”

What a kick in the gut; not only did he not even want my phone number, he didn’t even want to know one single thing about me. Yet I had and still have so much I would love to share with him about me and his grandson.

People have asked if I regret pursuing this again only to be hurt. My answer is absolutely not. DNAngels brought me something priceless—the truth. And although this isn’t a happy ending, after a few days of wallowing in my feelings and drowning in my tears, I found such strength and resolution in knowing the truth and knowing where I came from once and for all. Most of all, I found closure.

Almost four years since that DNA test, I have been through many challenges, most of which are all directly related to fallout of this discovery. It’s amazing to me how such indescribable hurt and loss can morph into such a source of strength and resilience. Not long after the initial discovery, I had a complete emotional breakdown. I stopped working. I became very ill and I even lost my home. I remember sitting there in my car in the gas station parking lot looking through my phone trying to find someone, anyone, I could stay with. There was no one. I was officially homeless. Since then, I rebuilt from the bottom up. Physically, emotionally, and financially. I even went back to college and I’m about to complete my MBA. After much time of healing, I reached out to my two new sisters twice, with no response. I have since put myself in their shoes, and I do understand how one email completely changed what they believed and thought about their father and the family they were raised in, and I certainly understand wanting to protect their mother. I will never lose hope that one day they will want to know me and my story and share theirs with me. Until then, I’ve found family and comfort in others who have been through this lifechanging experience. I’ve decided I must share my story with others. I have to let them know they are not alone and that not all of us have ideal happy endings with our newfound families. But, this doesn’t mean we haven’t gained something extraordinary from this experience, and I am forever grateful for that.

Angie Clark is from Dallas, Texas and has spent time in Los Angeles, Boston, and Stockholm. She’s a proud mother to her son Erik and a devoted cat mom. She discovered her NPE status in November 2017, and her story has been featured in several podcasts and publications. Clark is a graduate of Southern New Hampshire University with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and is in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program with an anticipated completion date of November 2023. She was a featured guest speaker at Harvard Medical School, and is working on her first book, to be released in December 2024. Follow her on Instagram @angiecarolyn74 and on Twitter @angiecclark.

By Kellie Schwartz

Many times in our lives we are told things we assume to be true. Some of these are harmless. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all visited me, and I didn’t feel betrayed or harmed when I found out the truth. I continued these traditions with my children and love that they’ve continued them with my grandchildren.

Sometimes the things we are told simply prove to be less valid over time. In 1988, my eighth-grade pre-algebra teacher didn’t believe he was lying when he said, “You have to learn and memorize all of these algorithms because it’s not like you are always going to carry a calculator everywhere you go.” At that time, he was right. Fast forward 25 years, and we do carry a calculator everywhere we go, and it takes great pictures too! And we even use it to make phone calls and receive text messages. He had no idea what the future had in store. Nevertheless, we don’t have to know everything because… well … Google.

Other times, we’re told falsehoods that have a profound effect on our lives and the lives of others around us.

I was born in 1975 in El Paso, Texas. I went home with my mom and my beloved grandparents, whom I affectionately called Gaga and Papa. My mom married when I was about 18 months old, and although I have no memories of those first months, I vividly recall my life with her and her husband. I called him Dad. They went on to have three more children, two girls and then a boy. I was the oldest and always different in looks and personality. I cried easily, wore my feelings on my sleeve, and was treated differently. Dad was a mean SOB, and I was his favorite target. When I was about six years old, my mom and dad separated again, and then we lived with Gaga and Papa.

Gaga pulled me onto her lap, played with my hair, and rubbed my chin (all the things she did to calm me and show me affection). She then let me know she had something she needed to tell me. I can remember so many things about this moment—the gold crushed velvet chair, the end table with a lamp next to it, a few tears in her eyes, and her hands. One on my back, rubbing softly, and one under my chin so I was looking directly at her. She took a deep breath and said, “Kellie Lynn, I feel like you need to know that Bill is not your real dad. Your mom and he married when you were very young. I love you, and I didn’t think it was fair for your mom to not tell you.” Even at six years old, I felt an incredible sense of relief. Although it would change nothing about my daily home life (my mom went back to Bill soon after this), things made sense. He treated me differently, and badly, because to him, I was different. I wasn’t his. The other revelation that followed was that my mom was not my protector. Maybe she wasn’t capable of it. She didn’t come to my rescue nearly as often as I needed to feel safe and loved.

For the following six years, life was status quo. I thrived at school academically. I was very quiet, read everything I could get my hands on, made great grades, and, thankfully, was a part of a loving church family. My mom left Bill a couple more times, and finally, on their wedding anniversary in 1987, she packed us into a rental car with a couple suitcases and we left. We went back to live with Gaga and Papa, where I felt safe and loved. There were nine people living in a crowded double-wide mobile home, but there was no more screaming, yelling, hitting, or name calling.

The following summer, I reached out to my mom’s older sister, writing to tell her I wanted to contact my real dad. I knew that if anyone would help me, it would be her. I sent the letter on a Tuesday, and on the following Thursday evening the phone rang. Papa always answered the phone, and after a few minutes, he said, “Kellie Lynn, it’s for you.” It was my aunt, Carollyn. She asked if my mom knew I’d sent the letter to her. When I told her she did not, Carollyn said I had to tell her. She added that she and my uncle were  going to pick me up over the weekend, and I would meet my dad on Monday. I was terrified. I knew my mom would be angry; I was scared of an in-person meeting with my father and yet a little excited. This was the heyday of the daytime talk-show, and that week several had episodes about people meeting birth parents and it going terribly wrong. Oprah, Donohue, Geraldo, and Sally Jesse did nothing to ease my mind. But there was no turning back. I went with my aunt and uncle, and less than 24 hours later a blond guy walked through the door with flowers, a stuffed dog, and a card. He showed me pictures of my grandparents, great grandparents, and a brother and a sister. I was shy and said very little. He was nervous, too. We ended the evening at Pizza Hut. I remember eating next to nothing and staring at my Dr. Pepper a lot. My mom came to town a few days later and they had a talk. Our relationship grew as best as it can with a teenage girl and a single guy who worked full-time.

 My mom moved us to the same town, and the relationship ebbed and flowed. He remarried, I made a few life choices he didn’t agree with, and we ended up with no contact for a few years. He missed my wedding and the births of my first two children. He eventually called and wanted to talk. I agreed, but wouldn’t let him meet my kids quite yet. We went to a local park and he said the words I had always worried he would. “I should have asked your mother for a paternity test.” I was devastated. It had been 15 years since we met at this point and a test seemed like such a moot point. Then he refused to acknowledge that he said it, but I could never unhear those words. They haunted me.

Life continued, and our relationship stayed very cordial, but not close. I didn’t know what to say or what he wanted to know. In 2015, my life took another unexpected turn. My mom was diagnosed with stage 4 triple negative breast cancer. Four months from the date of diagnosis, she was gone, and my life continued to change. I was left with three of my four kids still at home, and my husband and I inherited three additional kids that my mom had adopted from foster care. So we had two 13- year-olds, a 14-year old, two 15-year olds, and an 18-year-old. My house was chaos.

I took a 23andMe test, and when my results came in, I looked at the DNA matches and recognized only one name, but this maternal side would be easy to trace. Gaga had done extensive family research, and the one name was a second cousin once removed on my mom’s side. I closed the app and really never thought about it again. Life continued, and due to other hurdles in our lives, I put this on a back burner. Maybe not even on a burner really, just not even thought about.

In August 2020, I took an Ancestry DNA test. This time I was determined to prove to my dad that he was, without a doubt, my dad. As I looked at my results, I found numerous matches on my maternal side and I worked to try to connect other matches to my dad. The matches not from my mom’s side were further down, and I couldn’t figure it out. But again, life got busy, and I put the results away. In hindsight, I think I realized that something wasn’t quite right, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it.

In November 2021, I couldn’t attend church with my family because I had bronchitis. Thinking I had nothing to lose, I messaged the top nonmaternal match and asked if she had any family living in the El Paso, Texas or Las Cruces, New Mexico areas in 1974. Within a few minutes, she messaged back saying she had grandparents and an aunt and uncle who lived there at that time. The aunt had two kids who then would have been in their early twenties—a son and a daughter. These were my match’s only relatives, so the logical conclusion was that the son was my biological father. I sent another message for more information and soon discovered that the uncle worked for the same company as my grandfather. The pieces started to fit together, but my life felt as if it were falling apart. It was like a puzzle I’d spent my life putting together was suddenly put through a paper shredder and made absolutely no sense. The pieces no longer fit, and I had no one to ask questions. My mom and both my grandparents were gone. My aunt tried to be helpful, and she was supportive, but she was also shocked. My goal of proving myself to my dad had backfired. I’d proved that he had every reason to be suspicious.

Unbeknownst to me or his other daughter, sometime around Christmas 2022, my birth father took an Ancestry DNA test as well, and his results show us as a parent/child match. My goal for the next year is to grow our relationship. I want him to meet my kids and my grandkids and for them to know him as well. I want my new sister to meet her nieces and nephews and for our relationship to become closer. All of this takes time, energy, and willingness to step out of our boxes.

I will never know why my mom made the decisions she made, and I have no idea whether she lied because she thought there was no way we’d ever know or if  she simply guessed about my paternity and picked the wrong man. I wish she would have been honest with me, but to say my mom was slightly “truth challenged” is a huge understatement. As hard as it would have been to hear, “I’m just not sure who your dad is,” it would have saved so much heartbreak. Being an NPE (not parent expected) is tough enough; being a double NPE is even harder. Meeting a biological parent you were unaware of profoundly changes you, but I have now done that twice. Or so I thought. Not knowing how to handle a changed family dynamic makes you feel alone and completely misunderstood.

So the next time you choose to withhold the truth, stretch the truth, or just lie by omission, please think of the ramifications of that decision years later. Who will be impacted? What will it do to your relationships? And how will affect another’s memory of you?

Truth is powerful, and at times painful.  But without the truth, healing will never be complete.

Kellie Schwartz is a wife to Doug, a mom to Kelsie, Kyle, Cassidy and Caden, and a Lolli to Kendrick, Karston, Caylie and Aubrey. She’s made her home in Eastern New Mexico  since 1988. She sews, quilts, crafts, and reads when she’s not working or enjoying time with kids and grandkids. She and her husband enjoy fishing and spending time outdoors. She’s a double NPE. Follow her on Instagram @Kellie.Schwartz.

By Michelle Tullier

“Are we related to anybody famous?” I asked my mother when I was about twelve years old.

I didn’t like that the answer was “No,” so I repeated the question until she walked over to our encyclopedia set and took down the volume for the letter L. Her finger made a quick skim of the index, and she flipped to the page covering Louisiana.

“Him. We’re related to him,” my mother said.

I grabbed the book eagerly and saw an image identified as the 17th-century French explorer René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle who canoed the lower Mississippi River and claimed its fertile basin land for France. Something didn’t feel right. If we were related to someone as important as the founder of Louisiana, why hadn’t I ever heard about him? Why hadn’t we made a family trip to walk in his footsteps? I wanted to believe that man was my ancestor. I had longed to be related to someone who was not just a celebrity but a person of import and impact. In high school when I learned about Simone de Beauvoir in philosophy class, I daydreamed about being related to her—a possibility, I thought, given my French heritage, though I knew few specifics of that lineage. It seemed every time I asked about family history my mother swooped in like a defensive back making an interception to save the game, and I didn’t understand what game she was playing.

Decades later, I ordered an Ancestry.com DNA kit just for kicks. I hoped the results would shed light on my French ethnicity, hand me a long list of not-too-distant relatives, and, perhaps, reveal a notable person in my family tree. When the results came back, my ethnicity breakdown seemed odd, showing more Irish and English than I would have expected. Disappointed by the ethnicity results, but not suspecting anything untoward, I turned to the people matches. I did not recognize any surnames, but that didn’t concern me either. Most were third or fourth cousins, or even more distant. I was very busy at the time that I saw my results, juggling a demanding job and parenting a teenager. I told myself that someday I would take time to build a family tree and figure it all out.

Two years later, that someday had still not come, but I was having an unhurried lunch at my desk, so I took a few moments to log back into Ancestry. I was heading to Ireland on a work-related trip and happened to remember those ethnicity results, so I thought it would be interesting to revisit them before the trip. I logged in and was met with a red dot on the bell-shaped notifications icon. The bell tolled for me, so I clicked there rather than going straight to the ethnicity page. The message said I had new DNA matches to explore. Anticipating screen after screen of unrecognizable names stretched out to Saturn’s seventh ring, I rolled my eyes. But I still had half a turkey sandwich to eat, so what the heck, I would take a look.

The first match was displayed as initials only, with the statement “Predicted relationship: Close Family.” The match was made at a confidence level classified as “Extremely High.” I pictured long strands of genetic matter strutting amongst puffed up DNA coils, double helixes cocked, so proud of the match they’d made for me. I saw that this person’s profile was administered by someone who listed their first and last name in full. I recognized the last name as that of close family friends when I was a child, and I realized the initials of the person I was matched with were those of a son in that family, who was around my age.

There is a technique in photography called bokeh, from the Japanese word boke, which means “blur” or “haze.” Taking a bokeh photo makes the primary object of focus sharp and clear, while surrounding or more distant objects are blurred. There is good bokeh—Isn’t that a striking close-up of a pink camellia with the green leaves softly blurred behind it? And there is bad bokeh—What is that jarring mess of shapes and shadows, ruining a perfectly nice picture of a flower? I didn’t know if what I was seeing in that moment of discovery was good or bad bokeh. The books that lined the wall several feet across from my desk, arranged by topic and by rainbow colors within each grouping, streamed like melted Neapolitan ice cream. The files stacked on the credenza a few feet to my left blurred. The cell phone resting on my desk was barely visible through the fog. The keyboard below my fingers was, well, maybe not even there anymore.

Oddly, through the fog, there was clarity. I knew the connection of that name to my parents. I knew the connection of that name to my mother, who had always seemed particularly friendly with the father of the family. I knew, on some preconscious level, how this had come to pass. My mother would later admit to having had an extramarital affair and said she had planned to tell me on her deathbed. I couldn’t even begin to unpack the narcissism and grandiosity in that statement.

I had never, for one single moment in my life, suspected that my loving and generous “Daddy,” was not my biological father. But I knew this was not a mistake. I knew this explained what had been missing in my life even though I had never thought anything was missing. I knew this was how my life was supposed to turn out. I knew I was losing a father and gaining a father. People speak of life flashing before their eyes at the moment of death; my life flashed before my eyes at this moment of birth as a new person. It made no sense, and it made perfect sense.

I also discovered that I had been right all along: I am related to someone famous. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, renowned 18^th-century philosopher, statesman, and author of Faust, widely considered Germany’s answer to Shakespeare, is someone I can now call “Cousin Wolfie.”

I took the last bite of my turkey sandwich, closed my eyes, and waited for the fog to lift.

Michelle Tullier is the author of nine self-help books, including the Idiot’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination (Penguin, 2012) and has recently turned her focus to creative nonfiction, with the book No Finer Place in progress—a memoir of DNA secrets and finding one’s sense of self in the murky middle of the NPE experience. A graduate of Wellesley College with a PhD in counseling psychology from UCLA, she is a former university career center executive director and faculty member who taught the psychology of work. Tullier lives on an island in Maine because her goal in life is to not be hot. Find her on Twitter @Tullierauthor and reach her through www.michelletullierauthor.com.

By Matthew Jackson

Our assignment was to find an ugly coffee mug. One we hated, or at least had an indifference to, and then smash it to pieces. Then we were supposed to record our thoughts and feelings as we smashed this cup. But this isn’t about my take on that assignment. Not exactly. One of the other members of the writing group talked about a ceramic bowl she’d had for a long time. Over time, the bowl became cracked, but she still used it.

Until the day that she found a piece of the bowl in her salad. She knew it was time to stop using it. So, it sat, unused. Then along came this writing assignment. What better way to dispose of this cracked, useless bowl than to smash it and then write about it. So she took the bowl, placed it in a box, and destroyed it. She posted pictures of the smashed bowl and talked about it. And it bothered me. I didn’t know why at first.

Would I have thrown away this broken bowl? I will admit that sometimes I find myself holding onto things like that without reason. Sometimes I do get rid of stuff that I don’t use, or can’t use, and it makes me feel, well, better? Maybe? Maybe a bit better that I have more room or less clutter. But the bowl bothered me. Couldn’t it have been repaired? Did she try to glue it and it didn’t work? Why the fuck did I care? It was her bowl, not mine. And it was just a fucking bowl.

Then I remembered reading about a way some ceramics are repaired. Not just in a functional way, but as art. If something is broken, the pieces are carefully gathered up and put back together by a special process. It’s Japanese, and not just an art, but a philosophy. Kintsukuroi, sometimes called Kintsugi, is more than 500 years old. Kintsugi means “golden joinery, Kintsukuroi means “golden repair.”

Kintsukuroi is the art of repairing cracked and damaged pottery with gold dusted lacquer. The process is used to accentuate the damage and show the beauty in the flaws, the breaks. To show that there is beauty even in broken things. Especially in broken things. There is no attempt to restore it back to original. No attempt to hide the damage. It becomes whole again, but with bright golden lines where once there were cracks. And it goes even deeper. Wabi-Sabi is the Japanese philosophy of embracing the imperfect, the flawed. It is the belief that nothing stays the same forever, and we must accept that. We must see the beauty in things that are used, worn, broken. Sometimes, ceramics are even broken on purpose, in the belief that Kintsukuroi is the way to bring out its true beauty.

All of us struggle. That’s one of the reasons some of us are taking a writing course/support group for NPEs. I don’t think I’m out of line by saying that every person in the group has cracks. For fuck’s sake, I’m shattered. And I’m not even sure I believe it’s possible to fix me. But maybe there’s a way to mend some of my cracks. Maybe there is someone out there that would look at a broken, heavily used Matt, gather up the pieces, pull out some lacquer, and start gluing. Maybe that’s why the bowl bothered me. It represented a need. It, like me, like all of us, needed someone to embrace its cracks, its flaws, its breaks, and to mend it back together. Not like new. But with shining, golden seams that make it whole where once it was broken.

Matthew Jackson is a late-discovery adoptee. A retired police officer, he lives in Omaha, NE, near his birth family, with his cat, Aiden, and an extensive collection of Star Wars props and Lego sets.

Two women in the DNA surprise community are offering a healing retreat for people who have experienced DNA surprises, May 4-7 in Tucson, Arizona. The inaugural DNA Surprise Retreat was created to increase community and support for people who have uncovered shocking information about their families after taking a DNA test.

Co-founder Alexis Hourselt, host of the DNA Surprises podcast, experienced her DNA surprise (also known as an NPE or non-paternal event) in 2021 when she learned that the man who raised her is not her biological father. In addition, she discovered that she is white and African American instead of white and Mexican, as she’d once believed.

“My DNA surprise caused a complete upheaval of my identity,” says Hourselt. “I was navigating these new family relationships, feeling betrayed by my raised parents, and discovering an entirely new part of myself. It was very isolating, but this is actually quite common.”

DNA surprise facts

• It’s estimated that 1 in 20 people have misattributed parentage.
• 82 percent of DNA test takers learned the identity of at least one genetic relative.
• It’s estimated that 3 percent of adoptees do not know they are adopted.

After Hourselt met co-founder Debbie Olson, owner of DNA Surprise Network, at a retreat for adoptees, donor-conceived people, and NPEs, they decided to create a retreat specifically for people who have experienced DNA surprises.

“The DNA surprise experience is so unique,” says Olson, who experienced her DNA surprise in 2019 when she learned that her estranged father was alive after being told he died. “We’re excited about increasing opportunities for people who have been through these shocking events to come together and heal.”

About DNA Surprise Retreat

The DNA Surprise Retreat is for adults experiencing the grief and shock that can only be felt following a DNA discovery. The four-day event offers expert-led sessions and community for NPEs, conceived people, and adoptees who have experienced a DNA surprise. The retreat will feature six sessions led by experts on trauma, grief, self-compassion, and more. All meals are included. Attendees can opt to stay on site at a local retreat center or register for the retreat-only portion.

Hourselt and Olson hope to continue offering DNA surprise retreats in the future. “No one imagines that their world will be turned upside down when they send off a DNA test kit,” said Hourselt. “People need to know that they aren’t alone and there is help.”

Learn more at dnasurpriseretreat.com.

A story by Lisa Franklin

Maybe she was at the stove, stewing plums in a pot, the sweet fruit scenting the kitchen, Mason jars lined up on the table awaiting the warm jam. The boys were at school, her husband at work, the only peace she ever got. They weren’t home to hear the shriek of metal, to see her lift her head or watch her pull back the curtain or answer the door to the stranger.

Maybe the accident had already happened, maybe she was still shaken when she saw him standing there as if he already owned her. His dark skin, his suit, his tie. So different from her husband with his hard hat and coveralls. What was he selling? Someone was always knocking to offer something: vacuum cleaners, encyclopedias. No, it was nothing she could touch or hold.

They sat, he on the couch, the middle cushion, she in the chair across from him. She remembers this now, months later, as her hand cups her belly. She was aware then of her thighs beneath her skirt and the angle of her legs, of how her feet rested in her high heels. But, no, she was merely a woman in pedal pushers and sneakers. It was how he looked at her that made her feel as if she wore a strand of pearls at her neck, perfume in the soft spot pulsing at the base of her throat.

She watched his smooth hands as he set the briefcase on his knees, heard the latches snap open. She felt herself sinking beneath the soft brown puddle of his gaze, into the tight embrace of her chair. She had never seen anyone with such beautiful skin, the color of polished burl.

“Can I get you something? Water? Coffee?”

He did not look up from his papers. He did not smile. Or maybe he did, but only with one corner of his mouth. “No. Thank you. I have what I need.”

His voice, deep and unfamiliar, vibrated through her bones.

She had taken him away from his spiel, he was annoyed. She felt scolded. He cleared his throat, adjusted the knot in his tie, started again, his words like waves pounding, pouring over her, one and then the next. She heard the sound but not the meaning. She understood he wanted something from her.

He made a motion toward her, toward the rug.

“You’re dripping.”

“Oh!” She rose from the chair and hurried into the kitchen. At the sink, she shivered, ran cold water then hot. She picked up a towel but couldn’t remember what it was for, tried to think of her life before that moment, of branches scratching her arms as she picked plums from the backyard tree, the older boy taking the younger one’s hand as she shooed them outside, the growl of her husband’s truck as he drove off, but her mind would not let her linger, shoved her thoughts away and slammed the door.

Maybe then. Maybe the crash was then.

He must have heard it too. Maybe they both reached for the curtain. Maybe he was standing behind her, so close she could smell the spice of his aftershave, the faint tang of his sweat, could hear the quiet scrape of his suit jacket against his shirt when he moved. Or he was standing feet away, against the edge of the table, pen in hand, impatient. She sensed his determination, his need to follow through. The heat from his skin radiated toward her.

 “I just need to—” she said.

She does not know how one body found another, over the space of a room, over the resistance of gravity, over the weeping in her mind, how a minute expanded and contracted. She will never be able to explain how the plums boiled away and burned, how she was left with only broken glass glinting on the pavement and another beating heart.

Lisa a Franklin is a writer, photographer, and career coach. She lives in Walnut Creek, CA, with her husband and two cats. In 2018, she discovered through a DNA test that her biological father was someone other than she had always believed. 

By Kelly Vela

I was born September 14, 1956, the third daughter to my mom and dad.

My parents were married in 1947 when my mother became pregnant with my sister. They moved to Los Angeles County and in 1951 they had another daughter who  was born with a hole in her heart and only lived for 9 months. Her death sent my mother into a depression which she couldn’t seem to kick.

I was never close to relatives or my dad. My sister was 9 years older than I, so we weren’t very close, even as we got older. I never felt a bond with my dad or my sister, but I never had any reason to think my dad was not my dad.

When I was about 6 years old, my mom became friends with a man next door. She would spend weekends with him and visit him during the week at his home. This affair went on until my parents divorced after 17 years. My parents had been married for 32 years. My dad, who was a functioning alcoholic, never knew about the affair.

I was 23 went they split and my mother moved in with the neighbor.

My sister sided with my dad, with whom she was close, and I sided with my mom, who always treated me special. My sister developed a strained relationship with our mother. They didn’t get along at all and fought since my sister was in her teens. I was the very quiet kid who never got into trouble. I just developed an eating disorder.

I didn’t marry until I was 37, probably because I saw the dysfunction in our family. By that time, my sister was on her third marriage, my mom married the neighbor, and my dad married a woman I never knew. He stayed married to her until he passed away in 1997. My mother stayed married to the neighbor until she passed away in November 2021.

So mom and dad are gone, and my sister and I do not speak at all, even though we live two miles from each other.

It is just me and husband, happy enjoying life, no more drama.

In January 2022, we decided to spit in a cup and see exactly what our nationality and ancestry is—how much English and how much Spanish. When the results came back in February, I was super excited, curious to see what I am. I’d heard rumors we were related to the Prince of Wales.

I saw the relatives on my mom’s side of the family, but none on   my dad’s side. I contacted my cousins on his side and ask if they saw me in their tree. They didn’t. And my sister appeared as a half sibling.

I couldn’t understand how this could happen. I didn’t know DNA could screw up. I spent months checking my DNA relatives every day on 23&Me and Ancestry; I knew somebody was going to show sooner or later.  I noticed that I had some Greek heritage, but my cousins had none.

I’m not the brightest bulb in the box, and by June I was still trying to figure out where everybody was. I was ready to hire a genealogist to help me.

My husband and I were on vacation in June, but I was still searching on both DNA sites. I started opening trees that belonged to relatives I’d never heard of and looked at their pictures.  I started seeing a pattern. I came across one photo from about 1944, a man in his military uniform. The photo was labeled “Johnny.”  I stared at the black and white photo, and  the hairs on my arms stood up. I had no idea who this man was but I could see myself in him.

I snagged the picture and put it next to a picture of me. I sent it to my cousins and asked if they thought  the man and I look alike. “Yes, they said. “who is this?” I had no idea.

I continued to research the new name and history. I wanted to reach out to these people but was too afraid to try.  I changed the family names on my bio to include theirs and boom! I got a message the next day. I showed up on their DNA connections, and they wanted to know who I was.

According to the DNA sites, I was chatting with my first cousin. As she explained who the people in the tree were, I blurted out that I thought Johnny is my father. After a few more emails, they agreed.

When I was growing up, my mom mentioned that she had had a boyfriend named Johnny. I never knew his last name or during what time frame they dated. Maybe she was dating Johnny and my dad at the same time? She might have become pregnant with my sister and had to marry my dad. Or maybe she met him later when she worked at Bank of America, where he and his wife banked. Maybe out of depression she reached out to Johnny after my middle sister died.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that she had numerous opportunities to tell me and she never did. She took this secret to her grave.

This explains why I never felt that bond with my birth certificate father or my half-sister. Maybe this was why she treated me special and maybe why my sister was jealous of me.

My Greek family and I met over lunch. They brought me family photos and gave me Johnny’s retired police badge. They had taken the time to make and share a CD of his funeral and memorial.  He passed away in 2009.

They told me I look and speak like him, and if he had known about me, he would have reached out.

So even though I never would have suspected my birth certificate dad was not my father, I felt there was somebody out there. A big brother is what I’d been hoping for. Someone to protect me.  Instead I had a father who was a police officer. That falls into the protective category!

In June, when we were on vacation, before I knew anything concrete, my husband and I were kayaking in the Ionian Sea off Sicily, across the water from the  Ionian Islands in Greece. I felt a pull to be in that water. It was a big deal to touch it. Now I know why.

My husband is Spanish and Indigenous. His son from a previous marriage is Spanish/Indigenous and African American and has daughter born four years who is African American, Spanish, and Irish. And they named her Athena, as in the Greek goddess.

I believe things come to you at the right time.

I’m 66 and have only been on this journey for four months. It’s overwhelming to have your world turned upside down in one click of a mouse. I’ve been through a wide range of emotions—  mad at my mother for never telling me.  She’d been adopted when she was three years old and found all of her family when she was 40.  She should have understood what would mean to me.

I was happy to know I looked like my biological dad, but then had to grieve his passing and the fact that I never knew him.

I’ve been so frustrated, sad, angry, and happy all at the same time. I’ve cried and yelled at mom’s picture.

Friends and family don’t really understand the full effect this can have on someone. I have a one friend and my husband who are supportive.

I have my art that I pour myself into. I joined NPE groups and listen to all the podcasts. Hearing all the others’ stories helps me know that what I’m experiencing is normal.

 We are on this journey together, and there is strength in numbers.

Kelly Vela is a retired photographer, woodworker, and watercolor artist.  She lives California with her husband, 1 dog, and five cats. She and her husband spend their free time traveling and wine tasting on their Victorian front porch. You can reach her at gkvela1@yahoo.com.

By Michelle Talsma EversonI think about you almost daily, but it doesn’t sting as much anymore. I am so grateful for that because I don’t think that people are meant to hold onto that much pain for too long.

“You are your father’s daughter…” the Disney song played on my radio. Yes—yes, I am. The man who raised me will always be my dad. I cling to my maiden name like it’s made out of gold. Pictures. Stories. Tattoos. I cling to them all.

“You can sit in the suck while still looking forward to the future.” My therapist chirps and I wrote it on my phone notes. For once we’re not talking just about you. The passing of time does help.

Still, those same phone notes have a list of things I want from you—bare minimum bullet points that I hold close to my chest. When I mention them—those closest to me re-affirming, “No, it’s not stupid to want that.”—that helps. Each small acknowledgment helps.

You’re the part of my story that almost broke me. The part only those closest to me know. However I came into this world, half of my genes are yours. Still, I only whisper your name to those I trust wouldn’t “out” you. (I am so scared to out you.)

I apparently have your nose and your hustle. I, too, can work a room and make strangers into friends. I’m hurt. I’m embarrassed and self-conscious (though I did nothing wrong). I’d never expect anyone to replace my dad, but to know you exist and that your life won’t change because I also exist is a pain I cannot explain. A friend put into words what I couldn’t: “You expected his life to change too.” Yes, unmet expectations perhaps hurt the most.

I could corner you, rant and rave and ask about my list. Or calmly “make” you admit X, Y and Z. But I will not force myself into your life (no matter how much I want to). The person who is coming to rescue me is me. (Which is so hard to tell my inner child who apparently was still waiting for someone to come.)

And everyone, all well-meaning, have their opinions on what I should do or how I should act.

But they’re not the ones whose world crashed, and they weren’t left putting the pieces back together. They’re not the ones whose hearts break at nearly 1 a.m. in the bathroom, tears falling, wanting to scream into the ether that, “It’s not fucking fair.”

 Some days I’m glad it happened. Other days I wish it never did. Always I don’t understand how you could see photos of my growing boy (genetically, your grandson) and not want to rush to know him. If roles were reversed, I’d have been on the first flight.

As time goes on though, so many wonderful people restore my faith in humanity.

“We are so glad you found us,” your sister, my aunt, wrote on a Hanukkah card.

“Well, we recognize you and our children recognize you,” your brother-in-law said.

“It’s ok, I’ve got him,” my best friend says as he takes my son under his wing and allows me the privacy that comes with the occasional breakdown.

“You did nothing wrong, this isn’t your fault,” my bonus mom says as I lose my shit from time to time.

I am so grateful for the amazing people in my life; I pray their awesomeness overshadows those who aren’t supporting or seeing me in the way I would have it if I could control things. I have learned that I can only control myself. (I’d have preferred to learn this in so many other ways.)

So, I move forward and enjoy the moments where it doesn’t sting as much. I embrace those I love, and I keep a small flame of hope and prayer. I tell God thank you and I ask for peace for both of us.

“I have a good history of bouncing back,” I texted you once. It’s true, but even the strong need rest and safety. And I will find that, just not with you.Michelle Talsma Everson is an independent journalist, editor, and storyteller from Phoenix, Arizona. She discovered she was an NPE (not parent expected) in March 2021 and, since then, has been navigating how to best blend her writing and NPE discovery to be a voice and provide resources for those affected by surprise DNA discoveries. Read about her NPE journey on Scary Mommy and the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. She’s  also written about the topic for Next Avenue. To learn more about her career outside of her NPE discovery, connect with her on LinkedIn, visit her website, or follow her on Twitter.

By Eve Sturges

NPE: Non-Paternal Event 

(noun) A genealogical term used to describe the disconnect that occurs in familial lineage when a person, as an adult, discovers at least one parent is not biologically related.

(noun) a qualifying term used by people who have experienced the unexpected discovery of a genealogical disconnect between themselves and at least one parent. As in: “When I found out my parents used a sperm donor, I realized I am an NPE.” 

MPE: Misattributed Parentage Event 

A social term used to describe the myriad DNA-discoveries that can occur, including late-discovery adoption, donor conception, and non-paternal event. As in: “I found out that as a teenager I had fathered a child; when this person reached out to me, I realized I am a part of the MPE community.” 

Genetic Mirroring

A term or phrase used to describe the powerful experience of seeing similar physical traits in a relative. “Without genetic mirroring, I’ll never understand where my green eyes came from.” 

Facebook 

(noun) Modern society’s downfall. See also ‘social media,” “Twitter,” “Instagram,” “Discord.”

It was a lovely photo, an innocuous post. A group of dark-haired adults sitting around a table, smiling at the camera, golden hour sunset glowing from a side door. Colorful Fiesta pottery suggests a delicious meal is imminent. Wood side-paneling screams “Montana cabin,” and I swear there are golden-retriever puppies asleep on the floor. 

“It’s a truly amazing feeling when I can see all my siblings at one time again. The nostalgia hits hard and the old and new memories made are truly a blessing.” 

For a split-second, it’s no big deal. I scroll social media quickly these days, tired of its mundanity, confused by the chaos, embarrassed to be addicted to it anyway. I stop at this one, caught off guard by the golden hues. My heart leaps into my throat, and my breath quickens. I feel angry and sad at the same time. I think I am being ridiculous and try to move along to more important posts like parenting memes and TikTok tips. But my thumb is out of my control, bringing the handsome family back to me again and again. 

They are my handsome family; I was not invited to dinner. 

I do what any responsible person with feelings does in 2022: I post about it in a Facebook support group for MPEs. I know it’s the only place I will be understood, and I am right. The community love-wraps me in digital hugs immediately. Emojis rain down in solidarity. When I read the comment from a friend with rainbow hair, “wrapping you in my arms,” I cry harder. 

The only unusual detail about my non-paternal event is that my biological father reached out to me; typically it’s the offspring who deliver the news to unsuspecting parents, most often after a mail-in DNA kit offers unexpected results. But when I was 38 years old, a man named Peter called and said, “We’ve been waiting for you to find us!” “Us” included five new siblings. I had always wanted siblings. 

Let me start over. 

I grew up with three siblings and married parents. My parents are still married, despite the phone call that revealed I was actually the product of an affair they’d hidden long ago, hoping to forget. They met in high school and are determined to stay together forever. In a complicated and heartbreaking state of affairs between my family and a government foster system, one of my sisters left our home at age 12 and later died from medical complications resulting from her Down syndrome. My other sister suffers from myriad mental and psychological challenges that keep her functioning like a highly anxious 6-year-old. I have a brother, too, and it isn’t that we don’t get along. We do, it’s fine. But that seems to be as good as it will ever get: fine. Somehow, the three-year age difference between us makes an endless sea of different childhood experiences, and we have very little in common. It seems as good a place as any to mention that they—my brother, sister, and parents–all have blue eyes. My dark features were just minor details, explained away with shrugs and vague ancestry references, a song and dance familiar to many of us in this special club.

So, yes, I have siblings. I have an entire family, intact. But this photograph staring at me from Facebook? We’ve never had a photo like that. Congenial, familial, comfortable. Everyone at that dinner table in Montana has brown eyes. My dark, thick eyebrows were MADE to be with those people. They are my people. I am their people. 

And yet … is that true? As a psychotherapist, I take my clients through an exercise called “feelings are not facts.” I first learned it from a mentor when I was in my twenties, and I learned about it again while studying cognitive behavioral therapy in graduate school. A lot of emotional experiences aren’t based on the actual world around us, and it can be helpful to check one against the other. 

My biological father died shortly after contacting me. He turned my whole existence upside down and then left me holding the pieces. The truth will set you free, but the truth will fuck everything up, too. With my identity shattered, the relationship with my parents fractured, my world spinning, I finally connected with a few of these brothers and sisters on Facebook in early 2020. Three were receptive, two were enthusiastic. The pandemic prevented in-person meetings, but so did the stress of all the challenges that came with it in our everyday lives: lockdowns, mask mandates, toilet paper shortages, disastrous testing centers, grounded flights, zoom schooling, doom scrolling, and life evolving around us faster than we could keep up. I have three children and a private therapy practice that I run from home. Oh, and a podcast. How and when was I supposed to connect with these siblings, and where would we even start? 

I can hear my mentor’s voice in my head, and I can see myself with clients: feelings are not facts. I let myself cry, and I also start to list my feelings out loud: I feel like I would fit in at that dinner. I feel like it would be the sibling connection I’ve always craved, and they’ve left me out on purpose. I feel like we would all know each other in an unspoken understanding about having dark, thick eyebrows. If I were at that dinner, we could finally explore the millions of questions we have about each other, our father, and who we each are as his individual offspring. We would probably stay up all night and take another beautiful photograph with the sweet light of dawn coming in from the other direction. I take a minute to scream into a pillow about the maddening powerlessness of it all. 

There’s nothing left except the facts: If Facebook is any kind of evidence, I actually would not fit in with these people. We have extremely disparate opinions, lifestyles, values. They’ve made little effort toward me, but I haven’t done much better. The truth is that I don’t believe I was left out on purpose; I wasn’t even a consideration. It’s still an idea to chew on, but it’s different than an intentional snub nonetheless. The fact is that more than one sibling has suggested to me, in our brief message exchanges, that there are brewing tensions in the family, and they have their own complicated history; it is unlikely that the golden hour glow stayed for long. 

The fact is that I am often lonely in post-ish pandemic Los Angeles. I miss the ease of companionship and get-togethers, and we’re all exhausted by Zoom. Transition fatigue is real, and I’m unsure how to transition into six or seven new sibling relationships while we’re all navigating everything else. The fact is that I love dinner parties, and I’ve always wanted Fiesta tableware. The fact is that I am scared I’ll offend or frighten them with my millions of questions. The fact is that there’s a lot I don’t know about every aspect of this complex situation, and that is the hardest obstacle of all. 

The fact is that there are, actually, no dogs in the photograph at all. 

I’ve adapted the “feelings are not facts” exercise for and with my clients and added a second tier—the Serenity Prayer. This isn’t from my mentor or CBT therapy. Originally written by a theologian in 1933, it’s famously known as a foundational tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous. (No one reinvents the wheel.)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, 

The courage to change the things I can, 

And the wisdom to know the difference. 

The fact is that despite not having an idyllic relationship with the siblings I grew up with, I do indeed have a family that extends to many aunts and uncles and cousins who love me. We don’t have a cabin in Montana, but we have taken plenty of photographs over the years. A recent reunion was in Idaho, and I don’t remember feeling lonely or unsure about the definition of “family” on those days. I can’t control this picture on Facebook that made me cry, but I can contact my cousin, Jesse, who always brings the best camera. 

“Hey, didn’t we take some group shots on the beach? I’d love a copy please!” I shoot off using a family thread in WhatsApp. Others chime in: My cousin Mariah in Ethiopia also wants a copy; my aunt Ginny in Portland was wondering about it just the other day! Within minutes, a new photograph dominates my screen. We don’t all have matching eyebrows, and there isn’t a golden glow because it was overcast that day, but everyone is smiling. I remember that we are a supportive, fun group despite various challenges over the years. I consider the differences between us, and the family history, and remember that a photograph only captures a single moment, and a photograph doesn’t tell the whole story. 

I write a second message, this time to a half-brother in Wyoming. He posted the dinner party picture that started it all. Our relationship, thus far, is Facebook acceptance only. The courage to change the things I can. “Hey! I saw that family picture at your mom’s house. It looked so nice and fun. I hope you’re well. Now that COVID seems to be fading, maybe I can finally meet y’all one day soon.”  It’s met with silence, but I know I did my part. 

24-hours later, a message rolls in. “That’d be awesome. Sorry, I was at the gym.” 

A few weeks later and we’re still exchanging small notes back and forth, some kind of awkward attempt at conversation and getting to know one another. I messaged a half-sister too, and she wrote back about a recent move to Florida and with sweet questions about my own family. I feel less forgotten, or ignored. I’m holding back on the really big questions, but it feels like we’re closer to a dinner party than we were before. That’s something. 

I’m reaching out to my people here, too, the ones I consider my Los Angeles family, instead of feeling sorry for my lonely butt and waiting by the phone. I’m working on gratitude for the life I have, instead of wondering about the life I could have had if every single thing was different. I am allowing myself to feel my feelings, but I am trying to remember to check them against the facts, too. Eve Sturges is a writer and licensed therapist in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family. She’s expanding her private practice to serve the NPE population through counseling and education. Contact her for more information. Her podcast, “Everything’s Relative with Eve Sturges” can be found on all the podcast platforms. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter @evesturges and on Instagram @everythingsrelativepodcast. She’s also the creator of Who Even Am I Anymore: A Process Journal for the Adoptee, Late Discovery Adoptee Donor Conceived, NPE, and MPE Community. Order it here. 

By Eve SturgesBy Eve Sturges

After wrapping season one of her popular podcast, and just in time for the release of the first episode of season two, Alexis Hourselt talks about her own NPE journey.Please tell us a little about yourself — what was your life like before your DNA surprise?

I grew up a military brat, mostly in Arizona. I lived in Tucson with my husband and two children and still do. I love the desert. Before my DNA surprise I would say I was part of a close-knit family—my parents live a few minutes away and my sisters are here too. My dad is Mexican and my mom is of European descent, so I grew up ambiguously biracial. My days were filled as a working mom, wife, friend, sister, and daughter.

Can you summarize as much of your personal story of how your DNA surprise came about?

I bought an AncestryDNA test in June 2021 as part of a Prime Day deal. I had zero suspicions about my dad—I was always told my parents were married after I was born. I look like my sisters. About a month later I got my results. I was first struck by my ethnicity breakdown—I was not Mexican at all, but African American. There was zero latinx in my results. Then I clicked on my matches and to my utter shock/horror I matched with a man I’d never seen before, my biological father.

When you tested, you had a parent child match. What was that experience like and what resulted?

It was really confusing because my bio dad didn’t have his name in his account – it was a username, so I had no idea who he really was (not that I knew him, anyway). I was way too afraid to contact him, so I called my mom and asked if she knew. She didn’t based on the username. I spent the next few days putting all of my internet sleuthing skills to work until I was able to identify him. I found him on Facebook and lurked everything I could find. I found an old podcast he appeared on just to listen to his voice. It was all very surreal. A few days into my journey my newfound sister contacted me and that really got the ball rolling in terms of building a relationship with my family.

You said at one point your mother apologized. That’s often not the case. How did this affect your relationship?

My situation, like so many of ours, is very nuanced. Both of my parents knew the truth about my paternity—or so they thought. They believed they were protecting me from someone, but that person is not my biological father. So, while I disagree with their choice to keep a secret from me, I do understand the initial decision. That empathy made it easier for my mother to apologize and for me to be open to receiving it. I do appreciate the apology but I am still processing everything. It’s not an overnight process but I hope our relationship can normalize.

You said growing up you didn’t relate to your Mexican heritage. Were you raised in that culture and still didn’t feel connected to it?

Yes and no. My parents didn’t deeply immerse me in Mexican culture, but I live in the southwest so it’s everywhere. Whenever we visited family in Texas I saw much of that Mexican side as well. I went to schools in predominantly Mexican areas, at times. I just never felt a real connection despite how hard I tried. I always felt like an imposter but I attributed it to being mixed race.

You talk about discovering you were Black. You said in the episode about your own story “It was like I knew but I didn’t know.” Can you talk about that and what you meant? 

I’ve always loved, respected, and admired black culture. From music to television to movies to fashion, what’s not to love? As an adult, I became deeply invested in anti racism. So much of who I am aligns with being black, but it never occurred to me that I was. So it’s like I always knew on some level, while never considering that it might actually be true.

How are you absorbing or exploring this new knowledge?

I am and I’m not! I do think about what it means to be black to me, without having been exposed on a real personal level very much at all. Sometimes I feel angry about that. I’ve joined social media groups, read, and talk about it a lot in therapy. It hasn’t been that long of a journey for me, so I try to give myself grace and time. I look forward to diving into my identity more in the future.

What aspect of your own experience was most difficult for you? Was it the secrecy? That others knew? The sense of betrayal? The not knowing who your father was?

It was definitely the betrayal by my parents. As I mentioned, I always felt really close to them, so to know that they kept something like this from me was deeply hurtful.

You said that your best friend gave you wise advice to wait before reaching out to anyone until you were ready for rejection. What did that mean to you and how did you get ready for rejection?

I really didn’t have time to get ready because my sister contacted me just four days after my discovery! The advice to me meant that I needed to wait until I was out of crisis. I wasn’t even present in my body when I first found out—not exactly the best state to reach out to someone who has no idea you exist. I planned to get into therapy, process my feelings, and come up with a sound plan for whatever outcome might occur. But as I said, my persistent sister is like me and reached out with open arms right away. I’m so grateful she did.

How does grief play into your experience?

Grief is a massive part of my experience. I grieve for the loss of the version of myself before this. I grieve for how it has affected my relationship with my parents. I grieve for the life and relationship I never had because of this secret.

How crucial has therapy been and why? 

Extremely. I wasn’t able to find a therapist who specializes in NPE/MPE but found a fantastic woman who specializes in grief and trauma. I called her almost immediately, within a few days of my discovery. We’ve done DBT and EMDR to help me process the event and I credit her for how well I’m doing right now (thank you, Susannah!).

Your own DNA surprise occurred fairly recently, less than a year ago, and you began the podcast only a few months later. How and why did you decide to do a podcast? Was the genesis of the podcast a way of working out your own feelings and understanding this new experience?

I used to have a podcast with a friend and it ended it July 2021. I’d wanted to create a new one but hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do…then this happened. I decided to start the podcast because it gave me a creative outlet during an extremely difficult time in my life. While telling my own story is a path to healing, more importantly, I wanted to help others tell their stories. Another benefit of doing the show is connecting with others. It’s been incredible to have conversations with every guest.

There are a number of NPE/DNA surprise podcasts — how do you describe yours?

DNA Surprises shares the stories of people who were shocked by a DNA discovery, mostly through modern DNA testing. NPEs, adoptees, and donor conceived people are welcome to tell their stories and so are their families. My personal mission with every episode is to center the storyteller. Everyone’s story is theirs to tell—I just want to help them tell it. Ultimately, my goal is to provide support to others in this situation. My dream is to reduce the shame and stigma that lead to DNA surprises.

What’s been the reaction? What are you hearing from listeners?

The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive! NPEs, DCPs, and adoptees have all reached out to me saying that these episodes make them feel less alone. I’ve also heard from people who have no experience with DNA surprises, which is really cool to me because it means we’re raising awareness about this issue.

What if anything has most surprised you in the course of doing the podcast?

I am amazed at how similar all of our feelings and experiences are, from the initial shock to our family interactions. No matter how different our stories are, there are so many similarities.

Why do you think it’s important for people to share their stories?

Stories are how we relate to people. They’re how we connect.

Why is it important for the story teller?

The storyteller gets to take ownership of their story when they tell it. It’s also helpful for processing their feelings about their DNA discovery.

And why is it important for others to receive those stories?

For anyone experiencing a DNA surprise, hearing stories makes you realize that you are not alone. It normalizes an extremely disruptive and isolating experience. I hope it helps people find some peace. For those who aren’t familiar with our community, I think the podcast is eye-opening. And even if they don’t think they know someone in this situation, it’s likely they do. This podcast will help them help others. I also hope it helps parents make different choices.

How if at all does it help you in your own journey? 

It helps me immensely. When I speak to guests, I connect with others who understand me. I learn about new resources and frankly, feel normal in an abnormal situation. I hope I provide the same space for them.

Are you looking for participants and if so, how should they contact you?

Absolutely! If anyone would like to share their story, please email dnasurprises@gmail.com.

From the people you’ve spoken to so far, what would you say are the most common difficulties they have after discovering a DNA surprise?

Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has spent a lot of time thinking about the life they missed. One guest said half of her life was stolen from her and that’s a recurring theme. There’s also a big struggle with who to tell, specifically around telling raised or birth certificate fathers. My dad knew, but for those who did not, there’s definitely a divide in whether or not to tell. I find that really interesting.Alexis Hourselt is a full-time truth teller. She is an NPE and host of the DNA Surprises podcast. Alexis is a communications professional, vacation enthusiast, and desert dweller. She currently lives in Tucson, AZ with her husband and two children. Find her at www.dnasurprisespodcast.com and @dnasurprises on Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok.

By Michelle Talsma Everson

By Maegan Bergeron-ClearwoodFirst, if you feel called to read this essay, then you belong here. Welcome. Do you belong in the Jewish community? Are you a part of this religion, culture, and peoplehood? Are you actually technically Jewish at all? To give a very Jewish answer: yes, no, maybe. It depends. But this journey of exploration and curiosity—of questioning and wrestling—is absolutely yours for the taking. So welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Not everyone along the way will greet you with such open arms, so I want to make sure that mine are stretched extra wide.

An NPE* discovery is complicated enough, but when compounded by an ethnicity discovery—a Jewish ethnicity discovery especially—the complications are magnified. And Jewish identity is complicated enough, even for people who were raised Jewish. DNA testing may be new, but the question of “who counts as a Jew” is as old as Judaism itself. Judaism is an ethnicity, as you may have just learned unexpectedly, but it’s also a culture, a spiritual practice, a community, a set of laws, a set of holy days, and unendingly more. How many of those boxes must a person tick in order to be counted among the tribe? The answer remains: it depends.

There’s a beloved aphorism: for every two Jews, you get three opinions. Judaism is far more concerned with asking questions than it is with answering them. So if you came to this article asking “Am I Jewish?” be forewarned: you won’t get a clear answer. But you will, I hope, get a solid footing for the start of your journey, should you choose to embark.

The Rabbinic Answer

Let’s start with the answer you’d be most likely to get if you googled “Am I Jewish?” Or, let’s say you told a rabbi: “I just found out that I’m biologically half Jewish because the dad that I thought was my dad isn’t my dad and my DNA isn’t what I thought it was—what does that mean?” First, the rabbi would probably respond the same way most people do: a polite “please slow down because I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” or something of that ilk. Then, the rabbi would likely say that, according to halakha (Jewish law), you must be born to a Jewish mother or have entered the faith through conversion. For an NPE, then, this sounds like a resounding no: you are not, by law, a Jew. A reform or reconstructionist rabbi (these are the more socially progressive and halakhically creative of the four main Jewish denominations: learn more here) would tell you that patrilineal Jews count, but only if they’re raised Jewish—so you’re still out of luck.

Don’t take any of this to mean that rabbis are unfeeling jerks who won’t empathize with your situation, or that you shouldn’t seek out a rabbi with a curious heart, or even that all rabbis follow this halakhic law. But “Welcome to the tribe” might not be the first words out of a rabbi’s mouth when they hear your story, no matter how desperate you were to hear them said.

As NPEs, we are no strangers to rejection. We get it on all sides: from the families that raised us, for stirring up trouble; from our new biological families, for daring to exist; from our friends and partners, for being so damn depressing all the time. It’s particularly devastating, then, to seek refuge in our newfound ethnicity only to be turned away. These DNA results were what pushed us off the path of seeming normalcy to begin with, and now we’re being told that our DNA is not enough? If I’m not who I was before and I’m also not Jewish, then what am I?

So before you disavow rabbinic law entirely, a bit of context. The fact that Judaism exists in the 21^st century is a miracle. There’s a joke about Jewish holidays: They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat! And it’s true: on paper, Jewish history is bleak, what with the exiles, plagues, forced assimilation, slavery, to say nothing of the literal genocide—for a people who make up less that one percent of the world’s population, our existence is nothing short of miraculous. But it’s not a Chanukah kind of miracle, where God intervened to make sure oil lasted for eight impossible nights. It’s a miracle of resilience.

For more reasons than I can go into here, Jews don’t proselytize (learn more). Instead of growing in numbers, we grow in connection; Judaism isn’t about breadth, but about depth. Across hundreds of generations, Jews have passed along laws, traditions, and maybe most importantly, texts. Some of these inheritances seem ridiculous on paper (Why is God in the Torah such a jerk? Why don’t we light fires of Shabbat? And what’s the deal with shellfish?), but they’re the fibers that connect a peoplehood across the span of thousands of miles and thousands of years. This doesn’t mean that Orthodox and other more “traditional” Jews are more Jewish than Reform or Reconstructionist Jews or even than agnostic or atheist Jews, (because yes, you can be a Jew and not believe in God). To be a Jew is not to follow every single tradition. But intentionally changing or even rejecting a tradition can be an act of keeping those threads of connection alive.

In many synagogues you’ll see a sanctuary lamp, or Ner Tamid: eternal flame. It represents the menorah of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem, which was meant to burn continuously, across the generations, a symbol of God’s constant presence among the Jewish people. It sounds impossible, to keep one fire lit for thousands of years, but that’s the miraculous part: it’s still burning. In synagogues and on Shabbat tables around the world, the fire burns.

So yes, you have Jewish DNA. That means that your ancestors were part of this unending, miraculous chain of lights. What a beautiful discovery! Mazel tov! But if you knock on a rabbi’s door asking if you’re Jewish and they tell you “It depends,” or even “No,” they aren’t slamming the door back in your face. They’re just meeting your knock with a bit of healthy skepticism: your ancestors kindled the fire, true, but are you willing to do the same?

Because being Jewish is about so much more than DNA.

In fact, being Jewish isn’t about DNA at all.

The Ancestry Answer

 But it’s literally about DNA! Genetics are what got me into this reality-shattering mess to begin with! Science says that I’m Jewish, so I have to be! Right?

Yes. And no. It depends. But I would argue, that when it comes to this answer in particular, it’s mostly no.

Which is strange for me to admit, because if it weren’t for discovering my genetics, I wouldn’t be where I am today, and I love where I am today. My NPE journey is still, overwhelmingly, a hot, stinking, miserable mess of family drama and emotional upheaval. But becoming Jewish? That’s made it all worthwhile.

When I first started telling people about my NPE discovery, this was the most common response: “I always thought you looked Jewish!” My hair apparently, is a dead giveaway. So are my eyebrows. My “dark features.” My nose. Or I just give off the right vibes. “Yeah, I can see that,” people would respond. Gentiles and Jews alike, it seems, have read me as Jewish long before I knew that I had Ashkenazi parentage. Intellectually, I was always wary at of these responses. Surely there’s no way to “look Jewish,” is there? Isn’t that what the Nazis used to say to justify murdering six million of us?

And yet—it was also strangely comforting. My NPE discovery had fractured so much of what I thought to be true about myself, and this was the affirmation I craved: yes, you are different; no, you’re not crazy; yes, you belong.

The whole reason that Eastern European, or Ashkenazi, Jews show up as an ethnic group on DNA testing sites is because of a population “founder effect”: we descend from a small number of culturally isolated ancestors who rarely intermarried, so we share enough common genetic markers to classify us as distinct. Other Jewish ethnic groups, like Sephardi or Mizrahi, don’t show up with that kind of specificity. The attempt to genetically quantify “who is a Jew,” therefore, centers Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of so many other ethnic groups, Jews of color in particular (learn more about Ashkenormativity here).

And on an even more fundamental level, this quantification implies that ethnicity is a core component of Jewish identity, when in fact, the Jewish people have always been a “mixed multitude”: as far back as our exodus out of Egypt, the Jewish nation has transcended ethnicity, borders, and ancestry. To rely on a DNA test as proof of one’s Jewishness, and to equate being Jewish with looking a “certain way,” dismisses the beautiful spectrum of Jewish peoplehood, including Jews who have joined the tribe through marriage, adoption, or by choice.

The overarching implications of linking DNA to identity, however, is not only reductive and exclusionary: it’s downright dangerous. No matter where you land on the “Am I Jewish?” question, you have to tread carefully. Race isn’t biological. It’s an organizational tool for constructing social hierarchies based on difference and otherness. Jews have historically been racialized for this very purpose, across geography and time. The most glaring example is the pseudoscience of Nazi Germany, which made claims of supposed genetic markers to prove the existence of racial imperfections and justify the eradication of entire populations of people – Jewish, but also Black, Romani, the disabled, the list goes on. Genetics, both the science and the language around it, have been weaponized against Jews and other racialized groups for centuries. In these strange times of mainstream genetic testing, if I read someone’s search history and saw “Jewish ethnicity DNA,” I wouldn’t know if they were a neo-nazi or just curious about their ancestry. Which should terrify us. (Learn more about race, Jewishness, and DNA testing here.)

Technically, sure, you can call yourself Jew-ish based on DNA alone—but you run the risk of replicating some wildly dangerous rhetoric in doing so. As someone who ended up choosing to be Jewish after finding out about my Jewish ancestry, I’ve become much more familiar with the insidiousness of antisemitism, and the potential misuses of mainstream DNA testing frankly scare me. Ironic, that DNA testing is what led to my becoming a Jew in the first place, but true.

So if you’re new to this journey, I recommend doing a bit of reading: a) on antisemitism, particularly racial antisemitism, both historically and as it appears today; and b) on the incredible diversity to be found throughout the Jewish people. It’s critical that we expand our conception of what it means to be Jewish and who “counts” as a Jew; we need to recognize the glorious mixed multitude of peoplehood, of which genetics are barely a part, if at all. And we need to be careful with our words, particularly in this age of rampant xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t explore your roots or disavow the physical traits that you inherited from your newfound Jewish ancestors—by all means, learn about your heritage and honor where you come from, if you feel called to do so. Many NPEs describe their experience as one of uprootedness, and delving into one’s Jewish ancestry can be a beautiful way of becoming re-rooted. Ashkenazi culture has so much to offer, from food and music to literature and language, so dive in! Eat, sing, read—savor it all.

Over the past four years, I’ve fallen in love with the stories of Sholem Aleichem, enjoyed lectures on theater and history the Yiddish Book Center (a wonderful resource for learning more about Ashkenazi culture), and, after some trial and error, managed to bake a few decent loaves of challah with my partner. I’ve also come to love my hair and nose in so many unexpected, tender ways, even as I remain wary of what it means to give off “Jewish vibes.”

Being visibly and genetically Jewish was my entry point into becoming Jewish, but that’s all it was: an entry point. An invitation. An awakening to new possibilities.

In a way, Jewish NPEs are weirdly lucky: we may feel hopelessly lost at family gatherings or when we look in the mirror, but at our fingertips, there’s a rich cultural roadmap for living with deep, interconnected roots. The tricky part being: we can’t just read the map. We have to actually make the journey.

Choosing an Answer

I wish I could say that discovering Jewish ancestry means that your identity suddenly makes sense. If you’re reading this article, then you’ve already been through enough emotional upheaval for a lifetime: wouldn’t it be a relief to have some simple answers for once, to just know who you are once and for all?

But remember: two Jews, three opinions. Simple answers are not, unfortunately, in the stars.

These days, you’ll probably hear the descriptor “Jew by Choice” more often than “convert to Judaism.” It’s a language choice that’s meant to recognize the activeness of the person’s journey into Judaism. It’s meant to be affirming, empowering even.

When I first started considering conversion, I bristled at this phrase. None of this was a choice. I didn’t choose to be born with this parentage; I didn’t choose to have my ancestry kept a secret; I didn’t choose to learn about my heritage in such a traumatic way. My Jewishness was thrust upon me, along with so many other complicated revelations about my identity and family history. I didn’t ask to be Jewish—I didn’t ask for any of this.

But when I look over the past four years, I realize just how many choices I’ve made along the way. When I got that email from 23andMe, I could have slammed my laptop shut and moved on as if nothing had changed. But I chose to let myself be transformed by the discovery. I chose to ask questions, I chose to do research, I chose to feel uncomfortable, and ultimately, I chose to be a Jew. I chose to light that candle, and I choose every day to keep it alive.

This article was clearly written by a Jew, someone who loves their peoplehood and religion. But I recognize that not everyone reading this is ready to seriously consider being Jewish in such an all-encompassing way. So let me frame things differently.

Recovering from trauma is all about crafting narratives. Something totally outside of your control just happened to you. Reality has become unreal. The story of your life has ripped to shreds. And the only way to unfreeze yourself, to feel in control again, is to rewrite the story, with you at the center. You didn’t choose to discover you were suddenly Jewish, but you can choose what that discovery means.

For me, becoming Jewish was a way to craft a healthy narrative. There’s a beautiful adage in Jewish mysticism, that every single Jew was present at Sinai when Moses delivered God’s commandments, when the covenant between God and the Israelites and was sealed and a united peoplehood was born. The soul of every single Jew, across history and geography, Jews of choice included, was there at the base of the mountain, being called to their place in history.

This narrative brings me comfort. Was I really at Sinai, standing alongside every single member of this sprawling, interconnected family? Is that why I felt called to respond to my Jewish ancestry discovery—because my soul was Jewish all along? Is that why all of this exhausting, traumatic family secret nonsense happened to me?

Yes. No. It depends. Chances are, I like the Sinai story because it helps me make sense of a senseless thing. It isn’t my DNA that brought me to the base of that mountain; I’m there because I choose to be. And this act of choosing doesn’t make my presence at Sinai any less true–my soul was there because I believe it to be there, and that belief is realer to me than any DNA test.

If you want to make sense of your newfound ancestry, if you want to answer the question “Am I Jewish?” once and for all, you absolutely do not have to convert to Judaism. But you also can’t just ask a rabbi or trace your genetic family tree. You have to answer the question for yourself—you have to decide whether being Jewish fits into your new narrative of personhood. Making that decision requires curiosity, energy, introspection, and lots and lots of books.

It also requires patience. You may have discovered that you had Jewish ancestry overnight, but discovering your Jewish identity will take time. It’s taken four years and counting for me, and it’s been a boundlessly radical process. It may take even longer for you. It may be wildly transformational or not a huge deal at all—but that’s not for me, a rabbi, or anyone else but you to find out.

Exploring Judaism is one of many ways to heal and construct new narratives out of an NPE experience. You’re no less valid a Jewish-ancestry-NPE if you decide against such an exploration. But if you feel called to journey, if you really need to know whether being Jewish is part of your story, then welcome.

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

*NPE: not parent expected, nonpaternity event, nonparental event — discovering that a person you believed to be your parent wasn’t your genetic parent

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Find the author on Venmo @ottertarot.Maegan Clearwood (she/they) is a writer and theater-dabbler based out of Western Massachusetts. As an essayist and theater critic, their work has been published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, OnStage Blog, Howlround Theater Commons, and Everything Sondheim. They earned an MFA in Dramaturgy from UMass Amherst, with a graduate certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies, and a BA in English and Theater from Washington College. Find them on Twitter @maeganwriteson and Instagram @ottertarot.Do you have a story about discovering a new ethnicity, religion, or culture? We want to hear it. Read our submission guidelines and get in touch!

By Pamela K. Bacon

Laurie, Randy, and Pam with their mother

For as long as I can remember, I felt different, as if I didn’t belong. I was the oldest of four children growing up in suburban Detroit. My teenage years were an emotional roller coaster full of the usual twists and turns of adolescence multiplied by my struggle to sort through the isolation of feeling like an outsider in my own family. It became clear to me that the father I lived with was not my father, so I tried very hard to keep those feelings buried away. Did I mention I hate secrets?

A few years ago, a good friend gave me a 23andMe test kit for my 62^nd birthday. I was a nurse, and she was a doctor, and as both of us were getting up in age, the topic of health topped our conversation during our daily walks. She’d done a test herself and was amazed at the health information she now had a window into. I prepared my test and sent it for analysis.

Little did I know that my results would open a whole other window of enlightenment. I received not only health information but also the names of DNA matches. Several close relatives showed up in my list of matches right below the siblings I grew up with. They were familiar names to anyone who grew up in the Detroit area back then, but not as a part of my family as I knew it growing up. The pieces were coming together, but my courage to complete the puzzle was still lacking.

In 1984, a few years after my first child was born, the father who raised me died at 53 of a sudden heart attack. In the hectic days of planning and having his memorial service, my siblings and I had time to share memories as we looked through the paperwork and gathered documents for insurance and Social Security and took care of other details that needed attention after an unexpected death. In February, while sorting through our family’s important papers, we discovered a discrepancy between the year on my birth certificate and the year listed on our parent’s marriage license. I was born in 1955, and my parents were married in 1956. That seemed strange, but there was a funeral to be held, so we moved on.

Not too long after my father’s death, I got a big boost of courage and decided to confront my suspicions head on. I was a mother myself then in my late twenties with a young son. The desire to learn the truth was still burning inside of me. I’d never seen a picture of my dad with me when I was a baby. Come to think of it, I don’t remember any pictures of me as a toddler or a young child. I don’t think there were any. My mom seemed surprised the morning I asked her if dad was my “real” father. She asked me to get something from the silver file box that held our family’s important papers.

A homemade card caught my eye—a birth announcement that proudly stated “A King is Born.” I remember my initial feelings of joy to think that maybe I had been wrong about feeling different all these years. My joy was short-lived though as I opened the card to discover it wasn’t celebrating my birth. The new King referred to my sister Laurie, who was born 22 months after me. No one does that for their second child I remember thinking to myself, I was not a King.

I returned to the kitchen table wiping away a few tears as I approached mom clutching the birth announcement in my hand. “How did you know” my mother asked. I told her that I had always felt that something was not quite right and that I hadn’t felt close to dad most of my childhood. It was something I’d kept to myself about because I was afraid of the consequences of what I might discover. “What can you tell me about my father” I muttered. She hesitatingly opened the window a bit for me that afternoon.

Mom grew up in Detroit as the oldest of six kids. She dropped out of Cooley High School in Detroit to help the family with bills while working the counter at the nearby Sanders Confectionary and Ice Cream Shop. After work, she loved to escape to the dance halls scattered around downtown Detroit to listen to the all the great entertainers that passed through. It was the winter of 1954, and she was 19 years old.

Mom said that she had a friend named Mario who frequented the neighborhood bar and pizza place. He was a boxer with a contagious personality—a friend to everyone he met. Mario looked out for my mom as a big brother would. One evening when they were hanging out, he introduced her to his buddy Mike, a nice-looking guy a bit older than she who played minor league baseball.

Mario, who was Italian, thought it was funny that Mike, who was obviously not Italian, was obsessed with pizza. “All he wanted to do was learn to make pizza” Mario later told me, so much so that he spent the off season from baseball perfecting his craft. “Your father’s name is Mike, the pizza man” my mom blurted out. That pronouncement landed like a lead balloon on my heart. All these years of wondering who I was and then this. A name. Mom didn’t really want to talk about it anymore, and I decided to leave it at that.

The birth of my first grandchild in 2015 brought back all those childhood memories of feeling that I didn’t know myself completely. My mother had passed away two years earlier, but I still had a desire to fill in the blanks. I had a strong desire to tell my son a bit more about the family secret that I had kept hidden from my own family all these years. Later, when my DNA test results revealed names that matched what my mom had told me, I mustered the courage to take another step in the discovery process.

At a family gathering in northern Michigan, I pulled my brother Randy aside. As we sat on the beach overlooking Lake Huron that summer afternoon, I shared my story and DNA test results. He was shocked at first but said that he had always thought I had been treated differently by our dad. We joked as kids that we didn’t really look like each other, and Randy had maintained that his father was probably the Twin Pines Milk Man who always seemed to linger at our house when mom was around! He never suspected that I was the one with a different father.

Randy had been doing genealogy research for quite some time on our family and was certain he could help put all the pieces together. He explained that there were multiple matches that were considered “close” relatives to me that were not common to his results. The decision to finally share with him what I had hidden away and struggled alone with all these years would connect the dots on the secrets that my mother and I had danced around for more than 60 years.

Armed with my DNA records from Ancestry and 23andMe, my brother dug into the research while I reached out to some of the higher cM number matches at the top of my list. Our goal was to confirm the identity of my biological father and gain medical and family history for me, my son, and future generations. He shared with me each discovery along the way as the picture became clearer.

Our first stop after reaching our conclusion that Mike was my father was to reach out to The DNA Detectives, created by CeCe Moore, an expert genetic genealogist who’s consulted on and appeared in many DNA specials including the PBS documentary series Finding Your Roots and more recently helped solve cold cases using genetic genealogy on the ABC series The Genetic Detective. Randy shared the information with her team, hoping her search angels could confirm our conclusion. They were incredibly helpful in building out my tree on my birth father’s side using the science of DNA results, which clearly confirmed our suspicions. Professional genealogists from Ancestry and Legacy Tree Genealogists independently came up with the same results.

I also heard back from a DNA match not long after I had initially reached out to her via email. I was hoping she could shed some light on her family and how I might fit in based on our match. She replied enthusiastically, which was a bit of a relief. She was a first cousin once removed on my father’s side, and she proclaimed “we might even have to throw you a party” in her note, saying that she had a wonderful family. I tried not to let myself get too hopeful at how welcoming and open she was, so I let some time pass before reaching out again, although I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

I shared my conversation with my brother, who was thrilled that I’d made contact and that I’d found a relative on my birth father’s side. He urged me to stay engaged with her and reminded me that I had waited all these years to open myself up to this journey, so there was no need to tiptoe around anymore. “This is your personal history, and you deserve to know” he repeated each time we spoke about it.

I called again and was relieved to get that same affirming response from her. We talked for an hour and determined that another match who listed at the highest number of cMs was her uncle and my first cousin. She confirmed that her grandfather had a brother named Michael. Mike the pizza man! I’d gotten my DNA confirmation, and now I had a new family member who confirmed my connection to the family name.

Mike was a legendary favored son in Detroit and he and several of his children were public figures with a well-known story that matched what my mom had alluded to years before. Unfortunately, he’d passed away a few years earlier in 2017, but I was able to read quite a bit about him and his accomplishments. In November 2019, I reached out to one of my newly discovered half-sisters, and we had a few good conversations via phone and text. We even talked about meeting sometime, but then she fell silent. Months passed with no response. I eventually reached out formally via a mediator who specialized in these matters and received word back that the family did not have any interest in me or my story.

Although this was not the reaction I’d hoped for from the family, I finally knew the rest of my story. My family tree was complete for me, my son, my grandchildren, and generations to follow. I’d pictured how this might turn out. I’ve seen and read so many stories of reunions with happy endings after DNA surprises, such as that of the Duck Dynasty patriarch who acknowledged and met with his adult daughter discovered through a DNA test or the GMA story of an Army general and colonel who recently reunited with their half-siblings after 50 years. I hope that someday I, too, might be acknowledged by my half-siblings. It’s a basic human need to know where you came from and to be able to tell your story. There are constant reminders of that missing piece of my heart each time I pass by one of the family restaurants or read another news story about the family.

For my parents and those from earlier generations, there was shame associated with a child born to a single mother. My mother had talked about being hidden away by her family while she was pregnant with me and how difficult it was for her during that time. Although my mother and Mike had done nothing wrong—neither was married—my mother was forced to go to the Florence Crittenton Home for unwed mothers in downtown Detroit, where I was born in August of 1955.

The social stigma surrounding a child born out of wedlock has diminished over the years as generations have evolved, but it still exists. There are many like me who get rejected. We are left to feel as if we have done something wrong or that we should be ashamed of our history. I am still in contact with a few family members on my half-uncle’s side who have acknowledged me. And from all that I’ve read about my birthfather, I’m certain he would have welcomed me with open arms if only I’d discovered him in time. That’s what his public persona was—kind, giving, and people first. It’s not the Hollywood happy ending I envisioned over the years, but I hope that my half-siblings and I might still have the opportunity to get acquainted.Pamela King Bacon is a registered nurse from Portage, Michigan, and a proud grandmother of two grandchildren. She and her brother, Randy King, are working on a documentary about her story and their mother. You can reach her at pikbacon@icloud.com.

By Holly BerryFrom a very young age, I was always deathly terrified of cockroaches—these slimy, dark creatures that live in the smallest and darkest crevices where nothing else could ever imagine existing. I think this fear originated from being allowed to watch horror movies with my older brother before the age of 5. My mom told me that if I started to believe any of the movies were real, she wouldn’t let me watch them anymore. She assured me that the events in these films were just fiction, even though a lot of the scenes felt very realistic. If I started to have nightmares or be afraid because of the movie, I would not be permitted to stay up late and hang out with my older and cooler brother. I simply hid my terror about the many scenes that elicited fear. That’s how I continued to hide my feelings for the rest of my life, stuffing them below the surface so no one could access them and use them against me.

I specifically remember watching a particular episode from the 1980s series “Creepshow” in which a cruel germaphobe is killed in his apartment by a swarm of cockroaches. I don’t remember all the details, but I was terrified by the scene in which hundreds of bugs crawl out of his mouth and over his eyes. I was convinced that these filthy, awful creatures would find me and bury me too.

In the southeast, we make up special names for these creatures so they don’t sound so grotesque. In coastal North Carolina, they’re referred to as water bugs to differentiate the larger insects from the smaller bugs. The large cockroaches usually thrive in conditions with more rain and humidity and typically are more present when the seasons change to cooler weather as they search for warmer environments indoors. This important distinction is made so people will know that this type of cockroach exists through no fault of theirs. The other kind—the smaller variety—may signal to others that there’s an infestation due to less than ideal conditions, such as uncleanliness. As an adult, I find this differentiation ridiculous; it seems to reflect the way that our society silently judges others for their simple existence today. Because why would an infestation be anyone’s fault? This seems to place blame on being dirty or being poor or having no ability to rid yourself of the infestation.

In the picturesque city of Charleston, South Carolina, a true representation of the genteel south, these disgusting creatures are referred to as Palmetto bugs. I still remember the first time I saw one. I squealed in a panic while my then-boyfriend calmly explained that the Palmetto Bug is the other state bird of South Carolina, a true beacon of the city—a flowery term to describe a very ugly insect in hopes of accepting its indigenous right to exist in a city that barely stays above water.

Strangely enough, I’m not that afraid of spiders or other insects. I have a healthy fear of snakes, but an irrational fear of cockroaches, especially the large ones. Regardless of what they’re called, my fear of them continued to grow. Whenever I saw one, I broke out in goosebumps all over while silently trembling and desperately trying to escape the room. What is it about the creatures that live in the dark that make them so terrifying? Is it the idea that they live in a place of darkness or is it the darkness they bring with them that’s frightening? Maybe it’s the darkness that morphs them into these ugly creatures. Or is it that they live in the dark because they are terrible and are unworthy of living in the light?

Whenever I saw one, I’d chase it down with bug spray until it eventually drowned and went belly up. I couldn’t force myself to get close enough to hit it with a shoe; even the thought of hearing its shell crack or seeing its guts splattered would terrorize me. Being close to this  roach would seize me with a fear I struggle to describe. I’d wait until I could find someone else to dispose of the remains after the cockroach had died. I couldn’t even face the dead carcass in fear that it would come back to life and fly in my face. It was irrational, but most fears are.

When I was older, I’d learn about the idea of totems—spirit beings or spiritual objects that tell stories. An early form of communication before writing and documenting history with words became the standard—a way to provide value and show respect for all people and living things of the world. Any time I’d see a random animal—a bunny rabbit crossing my path or a tree frog in my window—I’d look up the significance or the totem meaning, much as I might try to interpret a dream. It gave meaning to everything.

During a pivotal time in my life, I decided to take an over-the-counter DNA test “for fun” and unexpectedly discovered that my dad was not my biological father. After uncovering many lies and secrets that my mom had used to manipulate me, I decided to estrange myself from these family members so I could focus on developing my truth and reclaiming my identity. At this time, I started seeing cockroaches everywhere. My house was sprayed twice a year for insects and yet I saw three in my kitchen over the span of a month as the weather turned cooler. I sprayed a third time that year. At a restaurant, one crawled across the wall behind my back. At a coffee shop, one crawled up the wall and flew across the seating area, much to the barista’s colossal embarrassment. I woke up in the middle of the night to see one crawling next to my night stand, dangerously close to my face. For some reason, I was seeing them everywhere.

I searched for the totem meaning. As a default, every totem website includes a picture of the juiciest cockroaches. As I scrolled quickly past these pictures with my eyes half closed, I found this description: “Cockroaches can sneak into a place through the smallest openings, so they bring the message that you should utilize every opportunity life offers you. Moreover, this creature is likely to come to you if you’ve been hiding your true self from others.” As I went on to read about the cockroach totem, I learned that cockroaches symbolize resilience and survival.

I thought about my own journey. Discovering at the age of 37 that my dad wasn’t my biological father opened a Pandora’s box of lies that had been built around me. My dad, with whom I could never form a connection, had always suspected I wasn’t his biological child. I was expected to have a relationship with my older, wiser brother, regardless of the abuse he inflicted on me as a child. All of this was facilitated by a mom who so desperately wanted me to think she was the most important person in my life. Born out of her own desire to not feel bad for her terrible past and a desperation to be loved unconditionally by someone, she withheld information.

Inadvertently, she’d teach me that I must be unlovable if my brother could hurt me and my dad couldn’t even hold a conversation with me. I felt I must be a bad person if, after their divorce, my dad would move far away and not take me with him. Eventually, I also grew apart from my mom and pursued my own interests. No matter how much I tried to anticipate her changing emotions and be what she needed me to be, it always ended in brutal arguments that left me emotionally drained. I concluded that also made me a bad person. If I could no longer be around the woman who did everything for me, then I must be bad. To cover my guilt, I worked tirelessly to make her happy. I put myself through countless holidays and numerous family events to show her that I cared for her and would never leave her, even when she made poor decisions about money and relationships. And she reminded me she’d never left me, even when everyone else had, and, therefore, I couldn’t leave her. I would be her fallback plan. It was my duty and my calling in life because I must be bad if no one else loved me but her.

I didn’t use the revelations of the DNA test to find belonging in a different family, but rather to find belonging within myself. I became the detective of my own life. Finally asking the questions I’d like to have to asked my dad decades ago, I wanted to know more about what the relationship between him and my mother had been like and why he left me after their divorce when I was so young. My childlike brain remembered it one way, but I was curious about his memory. I could finally understand that both of our experiences were valid and provided important information for my healing. Through these conversations, and, eventually, telling him that he was not my biological father, I discovered much about him as a person. He also carried a lot of blame about his own shortcomings as a father. We weren’t able to have a meaningful conversation when I was younger because he was also running away from his fears and guilt about not being the dad he wanted to be. I was simply a reminder of a very difficult part of his past, but I was also his obligation, much like how I felt about my mom. Ironically, after discovering he wasn’t my biological father, I felt closer to him than I ever had before. I could see him as a perfectly flawed human who was willing to take accountability for his mistakes and apologize for them.

By speaking my truth to my closest friends and family members, I discovered how much they hadn’t known about me. Many knew I wasn’t close with my dad, and because they hadn’t met my older brother, they thought of me as an only child. They saw me as super smart and fiercely independent. My mom was okay in their book because she was very charismatic and she seemed to love me. I felt as if the people who knew me only loved me because of the version of myself that I had built for them to see. As I spoke more about my truth, many were appalled that I survived such terrifying conditions. But as I unraveled all the information, even I was appalled that I had survived. Looking at the life I had made, it was difficult for me to be proud of myself. I was a highly functioning trauma survivor. I was the first in my family to go to college and achieve a secondary education. I had a successful career, a beautiful home, a financially stable life, and a very handsome dog. By society’s standard, I was just missing a close intimate connection and children of my own. Even with all that I’d accomplished, society reminded me that I did not have the thing I craved the most, a connection with other humans, but also with myself—one that I would only find after discovering the truth. I was still lacking this connection because I had buried who I really was under the fear that no one could love me because of my history. Knowing the truth and opening up about my past, finally living as my most authentic self, allowed me and others to love the truest version of myself—a bold, bright, beautiful, and resilient woman.

That DNA test shined a light on all the dark corners of my past and cleared the lies that had scurried to find darker corners. It gave me freedom from the dark and made way for the truth, which liberated me from the lies. Today, I’m not perfect, far from it actually. But I live my truth and I love myself more than ever. I forgive myself for the pain I inflicted on others when I was living in the dark, and I forgive myself for all the opportunities I lost to allow others to love me. I was trying to protect myself from being hurt by loved ones again. The truth is, I never would have been able to let anyone love me until I loved myself first. The truth, I now understand, is that I am loveable and I am loved. I am full of love for myself, and that love spills over onto others, even those who have hurt me. That doesn’t mean I allow them back into my life; those healthy boundaries are for my protection. But I can practice loving kindness from afar so the darkness stays away.

Now, when I see a cockroach, I welcome the opportunity to reflect on where I might be hiding again, where I might be falling back into habits of self-loathing or negative self-talk to keep myself small and hidden and safe. But I also grab a shoe or a book and I squash the bug and dispose of it quickly. Because I haven’t quite mastered the Buddhist zen of letting it live peacefully. (That’s my next lesson.) I can face the fear now; it doesn’t hold onto me or terrify me in the same way. While I’m still scared, I know that none of this is my fault. Cockroaches exist as the most resilient creatures alive today. They don’t seek to terrorize my life and they don’t exist to remind me that I am unworthy. They remind me that secrets live in the dark and have a way of escaping from the smallest cracks and crevices. It’s best if I just accept them as they are and face them head-on instead of allowing them to bury me in fear.Holly Berry is a healthcare professional in North Carolina. She was an aspiring creative writer in high school and college until she gave up these pursuits for a predictable career path. She was even featured in the extra credits of the film adaptation for the novel “Big Fish” as one of Daniel Wallace’s creative writing students. She’s revisiting her passion for telling and writing stories after a DNA discovery helped her understand her purpose. Berry is drawn to healing and hopes to use writing not only to further discover herself but also to help others discover themselves too. You can find her budding fiction book review account on Instagram @bottomlinebookreviews and follow her personal account @holliipop.

Everyone who’s had a DNA surprise will recognize themselves in the pages of Leeanne R. Hay’s NPE* A Story Guide for Unexpected Discoveries. Hay, a freelance journalist who’s earned certificates from the University of Florida College of Social Work, has crafted a memoir/guidebook hybrid, drawing substantially from her own NPE story and those of others to illustrate common experiences and issues that arise when family secrets are revealed and individuals learn that the families in which they were raised may not be their families of origin.

In 2017, on a whim, Hay purchased a DNA test, the results of which were shocking. Not only did she learn that the man who raised her was not her father, she discovered at the same time that her biological father was a man she’d known and loved since she was a child. And there began a quest to learn as much as she could about her origins, her ethnicity, and how such a monumental secret could have been kept from her. She felt rage toward her mother, by then deceased, bewilderment about her ethnic identity, and, soon, an overpowering sense of anger and helplessness.

If you’ve had a DNA surprise, these feelings likely will be all too familiar, and Hay offers the much-needed comfort that comes from knowing that you’re not the only one whose ever had these experiences and emotions or the only one who doesn’t know which way to turn. She offers gentle guidance about the range of situations and complications that may arise, from how to communicate an NPE discovery to others, how to use DNA to search for family, how to communicate with new relatives, and how to contemplate and make a name change, as well as the steps needed to move forward. She addresses the emotional pitfalls, including isolation, loss, and grief, and the repercussions for others who are affected by an MPE’s discovery. In addition to noting helpful resources, Hay also advises readers about the need to carefully assess resources to determine if they are truly helpful, expert-based, and reputable.

Although the book is written for MPEs and offers strategies for navigating the journey toward understanding, healing, and hope, its greatest strength may be as a guide for friends and family members, both families of origin and birth families. MPEs often rightly complain that no one understands what the experience is really like and struggle to express their feelings. Others may not understand and may believe that the MPE is overly sensitive or exaggerating the impact. Hay makes it clear that isn’t the case and advises people contacted by MPEs how to receive them with grace and understanding. This important aspect of the book can go a long way toward increasing awareness and understanding of the NPE/MPE experience and the needs of individuals in the wake of a DNA surprise.

A compassionate and clear-eyed guide to a challenging subject, it’s likely to inspire others to help fill the knowledge void and shine more light on the needs of NPEs and MPEs.Leanne R. Hay is an award-winning freelance journalist whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines, and literary journals. She’s a graduate of Villanova University, with a BA in history and minors in sociology and criminal justice. While researching this book, she earned professional certificates from Florida State University College of Social Work in Trauma & Resilience. She lives in Texas with her husband and their miniature Schnauzer rescue pup Arfie. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter. Find the book here. 

AnonymousThe Girl’s Mother left The Girl’s Father when there were just two young boys—before The Girl existed. She left the alcohol and physical abuse. She actually divorced him, though none of her children were aware of that until 83 years later, when a granddaughter stumbled upon the records online.

The Girl’s Mother built a small home for herself and her sons. Life was good and she was happy. She had a boyfriend, though no one remains to speak of him, and she was happy for the first time in years. She was as kind as the day is long, plus some, and deserved every happiness.

The Girl’s Father had been raised by a harsh and demanding mother, thereby creating a son of similar demeanor. One day post-divorce, The Girl’s Mother opened the door to her ex-husband and his angry mother. The angry woman said, “You will take him back and you will make it work.” Wanting to do right by her sons, The Girl’s Mother allowed The Girl’s Father to move back in. Best guess is that until that day she’d had as long as two years of happiness, free of this alcoholic anchor.

The Girl had been born during one of her father’s many temporary stretches of sobriety, and he loved her from the start. The Girl had given him back his family. Many years later, he told The Girl that on the day she was born, he went to the home of her mother’s boyfriend and told him that she would never be his now—that HE had won. This was the first The Girl had heard of a separation and a boyfriend.

The Girl grows. There are now two older brothers, a younger brother, and a younger sister. The older siblings like to point out her differences—her different-colored hair, her build, her personality. What they don’t know is she already feels different—odd. She doesn’t feel like she belongs. She is her father’s favorite but her mother’s attention isn’t as easily obtained. Years later, when he is a grown up with children of his own, one brother acknowledges that The Girl’s Mother raised her with a higher level of indifference. He tells her that he has doubted her place in the family and always assumed she was adopted. As if she hasn’t felt this disconnect her entire life.

The Girl learned early that being a daughter—especially the quiet and different middle daughter—meant there would be expectations. She began waitressing when she was 12 years old, with most of her earnings going in the bank and the rest going to pay her way and buy her own school clothes. The Girl’s Mother didn’t have such expectations of her other children. Because The Girl had a strong work ethic and a kind heart, she was often called upon to help, and she minded her younger siblings on the days she didn’t have to work. One day, The Girl’s Mother sent The Girl’s often troubled brother to retrieve her from school. He hadn’t made his truck payments and would inevitably lose it. When The Girl was a teen, her mother instructed her to empty her savings and pay off the son’s truck, telling The Girl she would own the truck. However, because he was a son, The Girl’s Mother would not make him keep the bargain. The Girl then had no savings and nothing to show for her kindness. The subject was closed. She was just a daughter.

Even after a lifetime of pleasing only to be held at arm’s length by her own mother, The Girl is still a fixer. She flourishes when she is needed. She has unknowingly carried forward the family legacy of ‘sons over daughters.’ She is always fixing her own son, which makes her feel important—included.

Still striving to connect, The Girl moves her family 1,000 miles to be near her parents. When her mother calls, The Girl comes. The Girl’s children love their sweet grandma, but even as little bubs they feel from her a lack of emotion or possibly even interest. A disconnect exists between The Girl’s Mother and The Girl’s children, but not between The Girl’s Mother and her son’s children who live nearby. The Girl’s children are, after all, just the children of the middle daughter.

The Girl stumbles through her journey. She wonders, “Where do I fit?” She doesn’t feel she belongs. She is sad. The feeling of not being enough, of being a square peg in a round hole, is still there all these years later. An emptiness permeates her, and life is a daily struggle. The Girl’s son continues on his path of self-destruction and selfishness. The Girl uses her father’s alcoholism to excuse her son’s behaviors. There’s always an explanation for his poor choices. The Girl’s Mother loves her grandkids but, quite obviously, the son’s children mean more to her than the daughter’s.

The Girl’s Daughter seeks counsel during a rough patch in her marriage. The Girl has previously advised her separated son to return to his wife and stay together for the children. Yet she advises her daughter to leave her husband while she’s young enough to meet another and, possibly, have a son. The ultimate prize.

Life continues, and The Girl’s expectations and hopes have dimmed. The Girl’s daughter is grateful to have had daughters and, gradually, also thankful that she won’t blindly perpetuate the cycle of superiority of sons. Not having a son also means her daughters won’t suffer at the hands of a brother as she did, struggling from age 5 to 16 to keep her brother way from her—from trying to touch her and expose himself to her. He was physically violent, too, throwing things at her and hitting her. The paint on the inside of her bedroom door was splintered and falling off from him banging on it so hard trying to get in. She was a quiet, religious girl, so it was especially traumatizing. The feeling of filth he bestowed on her during her childhood that she pushed down has left her scarred. Yet, when she told her mother this, her response was, “It happens.” The accused is, after all, her son. Did she feel that prioritizing the son would make her own mother proud? What other reason could there be for sweeping away such a confession?

The Girl’s Husband gets sick, and there are hospital stays and new worries, yet her indifference to her spouse of 58 years continues. It becomes obvious that the indifference in which the girl was raised has followed her into her own marriage.

In an attempt to find common ground, The Girl’s Daughter gives her parents DNA kits. She hopes that between tests and surgeries, they will explore their roots.

The Girl has lived a lifetime of distancing and an inability to truly connect to anyone but her son. She believes it to be based on the fact that she is just a daughter. She’s carrying on the mistakes of the past, handed down from her mother. Today, the effects ripple through the next couple generations: indifference in marriages, the sons being given privileges, the inability to form friendships.

A year on, a widowed woman sharing her home with her overly enabled son and daughter-in-law, The Girl still asks the question “Where do I fit?” This feeling of unmooring, and the question of being, have haunted The Girl from the beginning.

The Girl returns to her DNA test for answers, and the quest to discover the identity of her mother’s unknown boyfriend changes from a simple historical query to a genealogical necessity.

The Girl realizes that her deep-rooted question—where does she belong?—has morphed into a new but equally perplexing one: Was the indifference shown to her as a child rooted in the difference in gender? Or a difference in paternity?

The next generation, The Girl’s Daughter, commits to finding the answers. She spends hours, days, weeks, and years researching. She now knows that The Girl’s Father has no branch in The Girl’s family tree but The Girl’s Mother’s unnamed boyfriend from years past does. There are new ethnicities to study, new family stories to learn, new relatives to meet. The Girl’s Father will always be The Girl’s “dad,” but the unknown man is actually her father.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Christine Jacobsen*For months after I received the surprise DNA test results that revealed a not parent expected (NPE) event, I was obsessed with research into all things regarding a deceased Black man named Paul Keith Meeres, my biological father.

During the Vietnam War, I was more likely to identify with draft dodgers and conscientious objectors than someone who had actually served in the military, so it was a surprise to find out that Paul Meeres was a Marine in 1943 in World War Two.

Ancestry.com’s extensive records cited his rise in rank from private to sergeant and back to private on the muster rolls, and I was curious about the reason for this military inconsistency. I’d already received his death certificate, so I used it when looking for answers and requesting information from the National Archives.

Discharge papers arrived with a picture of Paul Meeres on his first day of muster. It was sad seeing a photograph of my biofather as a teenager going off to war. He looked so young. I was relieved to learn he was honorably discharged because I was learning about some of his self-destructive behaviors and feared that they might be the cause for a demotion in rank. Unfortunately, there was no information about the demotion. I would need personnel records to obtain that information.

On a beautiful warm day in September 2018, I was in Dumbo, Brooklyn, sightseeing with out-of-town friends. The change in military rank continued to trouble me as I wandered through photography exhibits under the Brooklyn Bridge. Separated from my friends for a moment, I stumbled upon an exhibit by the Marines. I asked Sergeant Bryan Nygaard if he knew how a demotion in rank happens. He asked where my father had been stationed.

When I told him Camp Lejeune and Montford Point, he said with an air of admiration, “Oh, he was a Montford Point Marine!”

He told me that in 1943 the first cohort of Blacks were allowed in the Marines, and that there could have been any number of reasons someone got demoted; racism could be one of them. He gave me his card and said to contact him if I had any further questions.

As I walked away from the Marine exhibit wondering why Sgt. Nygaard seemed so impressed with where my father had been stationed, my first cousin, whom I found on 23andMe.com, called me. She had a close relationship with Paul Meeres, who was her uncle. After we spoke, she texted me a photo of him in the Marines while he was stationed in Japan.

When I got home that day, I resumed my obsessive researching about my paternal line, focusing on the Montford Point Marines.

In 1941, Black civil rights leaders pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue a decree banning discrimination in the defense industry. They threatened to send tens of thousands of protestors to Washington, DC.

Days before the protest march was to take place, President Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting government agencies from barring employment in the defense industries on the basis of race, color, national origin or creed. It was the first presidential decree issued on race since Reconstruction.

Thousands of Black men were eager to serve during the Second World War. They enlisted in the various arms of the military, and following this decree were allowed to become Marines. Once Marines, they were sent to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and were stationed at the adjacent segregated base camp called Camp Montford Point.

I thought about my teenage biofather coming from New York and being forced to ride in the segregated area of the train once it crossed the Mason-Dixon line—the indignity of it. And the further injustice of shuttling him and his fellow Marines to the base camp barracks in the backwoods. The segregated base camp was substandard compared to Camp Lejeune: the decrepit buildings were falling apart. When the men left base camp, they were often spat upon. As I became aware of the racism he experienced, I felt a confusing mix of emotions: guilt as a person who’d identified as white and anger reckoning with my new ethnicity.

Then on Wikipedia I saw that 66 years after my father’s tour of duty, President Obama and Congress awarded all 20,000 of the Montford Point Marines the Congressional Gold Medal. The greatest civilian honor Congress can bestow. My hands shook as I sobbed at this on my computer screen.

I knew the family never even knew about or received the awards in 2012. Could it still be given posthumously? I wondered how I could make that happen.

Since Staff Sgt. Nygaard had given me his business card, I reached out to him for advice. He said he would look into it and sent me a photo from military archives dated 1944 depicting the Montford Point Marines at a swimming pool in the camp. A man stood on the high dive looking down at the swimmers. The caption read: Black Marines practice descending cargo nets in Montford Point’s training pool under the watchful eye of Sergeant Paul Meeres (on board) (USMC Photo 8275). I was thunderstruck with pride.

Finally, after I provided the New York Chapter of the Montford Point Marines Paul Meeres’ discharge papers and death certificate, they wanted to present the Congressional Gold Medal to the surviving family at the annual dinner/dance less than two months from then, on November 18th, 2018.

I wasn’t sure why I was so anxious for Paul Keith Meeres to get this medal—whether it was for him, for me, for the legacy of the Montford Point Marines, or all of these. Was it for redemption?  If so, who was being redeemed?

And then I was asked for a biography of my father’s postmilitary life.

Because he had been a minor celebrity, I was able to learn from online photos that after the war he’d had an international dance career; he also had a violent streak. He struggled with sobriety and fathered multiple children he didn’t support or know about, like me. I grappled with the idea of honoring a man who behaved dishonorably at times, but the more I found out about the Montford Point Marines and their struggles with racism and segregation, the more passionate I became about honoring courage and service to country.

“I’m stuck,” I said to my adult son, Alek.

All I’d been asked for was a simple biography of his postmilitary life. At first I thought about writing of his illustrious show business career, but then paused because of his messy, complicated, flawed side. I still had an unrealistic idea about the military; I imagined the attendees at the ceremony would be upright citizens who were morally correct and intolerant of  behaviors they might consider dishonorable.

“What do you mean?” Alek asked. At times like these, when I admit to feeling unsure in front of my son, I feel less like a senior citizen, and more like a confused child.

“I’m embarrassed that Paul Keith Meeres’ life was so out of the normal. I bet the Marines at the ceremony have had education, jobs, marriages, and children they raised. He didn’t do any of those things.”

He asked me, “Do you think any of the Marines or their families have experienced any of these conditions? Have they had alcoholism, violence, and dysfunction in their lives?”

I thought about the foolishness of my assumptions—that because they were Marines they didn’t possess the character flaws and defects we all struggle with. With Alek’s guidance, a layer of humiliation slid off my body. I could still respect Paul Meeres’ service in the military during World War 2 while opening my heart to his humanity. I wrote that biography and a speech because my son was right—the Montford Point Marines and their families would understand, maybe better than any others, the struggle to be human. This was part of my inheritance as the daughter of a Montford Point Marine, a mixed-race woman whose ancestors echoed down to her from the past.

I invited all my newfound relatives to the ceremony, but only my half-sister, Paula, whom I had just met just twice prior to that evening, was able to come. With my husband, Angelo, now four weeks after hip replacement surgery, I picked her up at her house. She wore a glittery top and ruby red lipstick. Alek met us at Antun’s, the venue in Jamaica, Queens.

“Do you want to stand with me during the ceremony?” I asked Paula. We held hands a lot that evening, and later, looking at the video of the event, I noticed I put my arm around her almost instinctually.

The color guard marched in as an Audra Day track of “I’ll Rise Up” played in the background. From the first bar of that song, I tried not to cry.

On easels behind my sister and me were framed declarations from President Obama and the Marines. The medal, nestled in a velvet lined box, was heavy as I held it in my hand.

The inscription read For Outstanding Perseverance and Courage that inspired social change in the Marines Corps.

The tears I tried so hard to hold back flowed down my cheeks as I stepped up to the podium to give my speech:

Nelson Mandela said “what counts in life is not the mere fact that we lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.” The Congressional Gold Medal affirms the significance of the life of Paul Keith Meeres and the other Marines who trained at Montford Point Camp. In this day of increasing intolerance and division in our country, it is heartening to realize that Congress, in 2012, was able and willing to show the national appreciation for the distinguished achievement and contribution the Montford Point Marines gave to American history and importantly, to African American history. The qualities of standing firm despite formidable odds, racism, and inhumane treatment is the mark of a hero, the making of the Montford Point Marines. My family and I are grateful for the patriotism Paul Meeres exhibited and the difference he made in the lives of the Marines who followed him. Semper fi.

After the ceremony, in the photo session, several Montford Point Marines, all in their 80s and 90s, were brought up to pose for pictures with us. One came up to me and said, “I remember Sgt. Meeres. He was my swimming instructor.” It was a great honor to be in their company, to acknowledge the Montford Point legacy, and mark my allegiance to my biological father. We were in a sea of multihued faces and military uniforms and were welcomed into the Montford Point community, descendants of Paul Keith Meeres.

Always faithful.

When the ceremonies were over, the dance floored was cleared and we all boogied to the tune of the Electric Slide, Paula, me, Alek, and Angelo, who stood on the dance floor with us, leaning on his cane.

*Adapted from her book, “Dancing Around the Truth”Christine Jacobsen is a retired school counselor who dedicated 20 years to education in upstate New York. Prior to that she had an engaging, decade-long career in the performing arts, appearing on Broadway and feature films. She’s written for local magazines and school journals highlighting topics of human development. Her debut memoir was inspired by a DNA test surprise, which left her asking herself, “Who Am I?” Follow her on Twitter @Christinesstory and on Instagram @christinefromqueens. 

BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.